Re: Gravity bike

[Doug Craigen <dcc@ESCAPE.CA>]

Larry Cartwright wrote:
> What's going on is a little sloppiness on the part of the webpage
> author(s).  They didn't give the webpage an identifying suffix such as
> .htm or .html, so some web browser client software (Netscape 4.7x for
> example) doesn't recognize that it's a webpage and just displays it as
> text.
> Other browsers (MS Internet Explorer 5.5 for example) assume that it's a
> webpage and display it properly.  Score one artificial intelligence
> point for The Evil Empire; IE5.5 is "smart" enough to recognize an HTML
> page without having a filename suffix to confirm it.

Aside from the browser recognizing extensions, the web server also sets
a mime type for the browser's benefit.  This site is served by
Apache/1.3.22 (Unix) PHP/4.0.4pl1 on Solaris 8.  There is nothing from
any Evil Empire here.  I think its double sloppiness - neither giving an
extension, nor configuring Apache to give an html type to files without
an extension.  The only contribution of the Evil Empire is that the file
was created using MS WORD 97.

In fact, on closer examination, there appears to be another layer of
sloppiness - there is various code like <!--#exec
cmd="/WWW/www.space.com/cgi-bin/randtopdartad.pl
'space.dart/businesstechnology;site=space.dart;section=businesstechnology'"
-->
that would be intended as instructions to the server and it shouldn't be
appearing in the page.  This line looks to me like a server-side include
using Perl.  None of them look like PHP instructions.  Somewhere they
are either including inappropriate instructions or haven't set the
server to process server side includes in no-extension pages.

All this can be explained by saying that the page was supposed to end in
.shtml - in which case there is only one error.

\_/^\_/^\_/^\_/^\_/^\_/^\_/^\_/^\_/^\_/^\_/^\_/^\_/^\

Doug Craigen
          http://www.dctech.com/physics/about_dc.html