WASD Hypertext Services - Environment Overview

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2 - HyperText Transport Protocol Daemon

The most fundamental component of the WASD VMS hypertext environment is the HTTPd, or HyperText Protocol Transport Daemon, a program serving the hypertext environment to the browser clients.

The WASD version provides a complete implementation of a basic HTTP server, including:

Scripts

The WASD scripting mechanism is based on the WWW CGI Common Gateway Interface (CGI, modelled on the CERN and NCSA VMS implementations).

Scripts are programs external to the main server that behave as gateways to non-hypertext data formats, usually interpreting those formats into HTML before transport to and use by the browser. The WASD environment provides a number of scripts for accessing VMS-specific, DEC-specific and some other WASD-specific information.


2.1 - Auto-Scripting

A script can be automatically activated by the server through it detecting the content-type of the specified document (based on the file extension (e.g. ".TXT")).

This auto-scripting can occur whenever the document specification includes no file version number. If a file version number is present the file is always returned directly to the browser. The browser must then process the document in some fashion (often by activating a save as dialog). A simple way of suppressing the auto-scripting facility is to include a latest-version number (i.e. ";0"), as in this specification "/sys$common/syshlp/helplib.hlb;0".

The current scripts supported by the WASD hypertext environment include:

A specific script can also be explicitly requested in the request URL. See subsequent sections describing individual scripts.


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