On Wed, 25 Jul 2001, Ross Virgin wrote:
> Back in the "dark old days" (the great old days) of Telix,
> Procomm, Bitcom, PCtalk..... when you called a BBS, you
> could open a Capture file (named VERGE.001). As you
> hopped around the BBS, scrolling through bulletins,
> running through doors, reading chat areas ... everything
> which came across your monitor also went straight to
> the file VERGE.001
Basically, this is all "stream" type data, all across
one connection between two given points.
> I am hoping that Arachne can open some type of Capture
> file (named VERGE.002), such that as I hop from web site,
> to web site it is all captured in the file VERGE.002
> If I go to www.google.com and scan through 100 messages
> in any of their newsgroups, I hope all 100 messages
> will be captured in VERGE.002 Again, when offline, I
> would hope I could view/print any portion of VERGE.002
At the very least, a website opens two connections.
The first to get the HEAD info, which you see in your
cache with the .htp extension, and the second will be
the html file. More than likely it will open another,
grab a graphics file, close that. Open another, grab
that graphics file, close, etc., until the entire page
is grabbed. If such data really were "spooled" you
couldn't make any sense of it anyway.
To put it another way, a single web page is actually
many files viewed together to form that single page,
but they're not in any kind of serial arrangement. In
order to go back and see it, all those files need to
be separate, and referenced to each other in some
meaningful way.
You have this feature in your cache... though the
file names really don't have much human meaning.
Go look at 996108207.HTM for instance, and you'll
see the web page, complete with graphics, just as
you viewed it online.
A capture file is a useful tool for direct dial-up
and telnet sessions (maybe even ftp sometimes), but
isn't really relevant to the world of web pages.
- Steve
