Samba and web pages

[Robert Krawitz]

   From: John Chambers <jc at trillian.mit.edu>
   Date: Sun, 09 Mar 2008 03:56:34

   Robert Krawitz commented:
   |    Date: Sat, 8 Mar 2008 22:21:37 -0500
   |    From: "John Abreau" <abreauj at gmail.com>
   |
   |    This isn't handled in the browser at all. Apache has a
   |    user-overridable function for listing a directory, and its default
   |    function for listing a directory happens to look for a sequence of
   |    files such as index.html, and if it finds one of these, it returns
   |    it; otherwise it generates a directory listing.
   |
   |    In the absence of apache, or other http-server software that
   |    implements the same behavior, you simply won't get this behavior.
   |
   | A browser could certainly emulate the behavior when browsing a local
   | directory.

   Yeah, but which ones do? Actually, I spent a few minutes testing on
   a handy machine with a dozen browsers installed, and the browsers
   that I tried all produced some sort of listing of directories.  The
   data generally looks like a reformatted "ls -al" listing.  A few of
   them popped up a file-manager type window to show the directory
   contents.  This was a bit of a hassle, since I couldn't just click
   on a text file's name and have the browser show me the contents.
   Anyway, I think I'd prefer this behavior to the browser emulating
   an apache listing, which isn't as good as ls's output.

I'm not aware of any browsers that *currently* implement this behavior
-- I was just pointing out that there's nothing in principle
preventing a browser from doing so.  Writing a Firefox extension to do
this would probably be a simple matter for someone who knows how to
write Firefox extensions.

-- 
This message has been scanned for viruses and
dangerous content by MailScanner, and is
believed to be clean.