Subject: Re: web, schmeb, give me a hierarchy
From: timbl (Tim Berners-Lee)
To: [email-masked], [email-masked]
Date: Fri, 21 Aug 92 18:44:50 GMT+0100

Ed,

First off, thanks for the pointer to the Gophercon report.

You would like to be able to browse through the directories
of the http server's file system.  I gree this would be a useful
feature, and it is one we aim to put in one day (trivial like
all the other things to do :-).

Mind you, there are some things in the W3 team's directory
which are just temporary or junk or old versions, etc. So
we might feel that we don't want people reading for example
our c files as we edit them. There's a bit of security there
that if we temporarily leave in a WWW directory
something which we wouldn't want distributed (like a copy
of passwd -- unlikely but an example) then noone will
find it. These are our working directories. So probably when
we dop produce a server which will serve directories, which
will make it MUCH easier to publish plain text a la Gopher
server, then we might ourselves disable it.

What we SHOULD do is WAIS-index the lot and also make a
little recursive   "www -lR" which traverses a web.
Another trivial bit of code...  You have to have a 
terminating condition of course.

BTW thanks also for mentioning W3 again in Gopherville.
I liked teh bit in the report about W3 being the result of
"heavy investment" by the Physics community. At CERN we are
trying to arrange for a third person... Bothe W3 and Gopher
of course are basically grass-roots sourced. We are talking about
a W3 support consortium ... maybe a W3con is not too far off.

Tim