[HECnet] Lynx

[Johnny Billquist]

On 2013-01-29 15:36, Brian Schenkenberger, VAXman- wrote:
Johnny Billquist <bqt at softjar.se> writes:

On 2013-01-29 13:44, Erik Olofsen wrote: > HECnetters, > > Is anyone
interested in using Lynx on HECnet? > > Using node names in the url is
not possible; some information is here: > >
http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/lynx-dev/1997-01/msg00057.html > > On
my Alpha with VMS 6.1, I'm able to compile Lynx version 2.3. > > It
seems that the latest version, 2.8.7, does not compile under VMS 8.3. >
Perhaps I'm going to have a look at the old sources; perhaps I'm going
to do something more useful...

Well, the basic "problem" is that there is no http object defined in
DECnet, nor any equivalent to the http protocol, so how would you expect
it to work?

DECnet is not IP, nor TCP.

There are web servers for VMS and I believe you have one running on RSX.
The problem is not one of http but shipping that http over DECnet.   Get
the browser and web server speaking DECnet and you're 99% of the way to
the goal.

Certainly there are web servers for both VMS and RSX. None of them (to my knowledge) speaks DECnet. And then you need some browser that also speaks DECnet, and which agrees on the protocol.
There is a problem with the standard http protocol which makes it slightly tricky with DECnet.
http expects to be able to send empty lines. DECnet don't do that. DECnet sends records, and empty records don't get sent at all. I realized this when looking at the MAIL-11 protocol...
So we'd need to do some changes to the http protocol to adopt it on DECnet...

	Johnny