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Subject:Re: HELP Creating WWW Home pages From:Chet Ensign <Chet_Ensign%LDS -at- NOTES -dot- WORLDCOM -dot- COM> Date:Tue, 14 Mar 1995 10:28:48 EDT
Karen Bachman writes,
<-- Do any of you who have created home pages with hyperlinks know
how to password protect certain links? -->
Karen,
There is no direct support for this in the HTTP/HTML/Web browser architecture.
You can, however, fake it with back end programming.
For background, the Web is built on two standards:
1. HTTP -- HyperText Transport Protocol, the communications protocol that Web
components (servers and clients/browsers).
2. HTML -- HyperText Markup Language, an SGML-based markup language that
defines the components of a document.
Links are defined within HTML via the <a> (anchor) tag. You use the <a> tag to
identifiy a location that can be the end point of a hypertext jump, and the
jump itself. A typical anchor tag in the HTML source looks like <a
href="http://www.thisthat";>this</a>. It simple specifies the protocol to be
followed (http, ftp, gopher, etc, etc.) and, for a hypertext jump, the location
it can go to.
One key limitation of the whole scheme is that the Web is stateless. That means
that you don't actually open a "session" when you access a home page. If you
access my home page, my server gets an HTTP message that some browser out that
has requested the home page. It hands the home page back. End of "session."
Until the next request comes along.
In order to password protect certain hypertext links, you would either have to
build controls in on the browser side (perhaps some sort of low-level filter
sitting behind the browser evaulating the link before letting it go through --
a probable maintenance nightmare) or you would have to fudge some way of adding
information into the message sent to the server that it could use to evaluate
the request when it was received. Less of a maintenance nightmare, but still
requires custom programming at the server and possibly browser level. Can be
done -- or there may be other ways of getting the same effect. We're playing
around with similar problems here. Interesting stuff.
Hope this helps a bit.
Best regards,
/chet
Chet Ensign
Logical Design Solutions, Inc.
(908) 771-9221
