InformationWeek
Defining The Business Value Of Technology
By
Jason Levitt
February 17, 1997
The Mysteries Of "One-Button" Web Publishing
Publishing World Wide Web pages is one of those areas of technical m inutiae that no one seems to understand and few think is important enough to learn. What a great topic to write about, eh? Seriously, I think the topic is gaining importance, especially as we enter the age of maturing Web standards and consumer appliances that can access the Web. Unsophisticated users need to be able to update Web site files easily, and system administrators need safe, standardized methods that let those users gain access to the sites.
Unfortunately, there are several methods used to write files to Web sites, and none of them are completely satisfactory. When I write about Web publishing here, I'm specifically referring to the capability of writing files to a site. It's the opposite of browsing. When you browse, you retrieve a document at a URL -- for example, http://www.informationweek.com/index.html. When you publish, you write the file back, probably after you've edited it. Sounds easy, right?
Well, it would be easy if all the Web server vendors would agree on how to write file s back to the servers. Unfortunately, they haven't, and so there are many (well, at least three, anyway) ways to write files back to Web sites. Netscape Communications advocates its "one-button publishing" method, Microsoft uses a protocol implemented in its FrontPage software, and there is one more method, FTP (File Transfer Protocol), that is sort of the de facto standard and least-common-denominator method. There are also some other ways to accomplish writing files to a server ,such as having a specialized client program on your machine that communicates to a CGI (Common Gateway Interface) program running on the server. The following table summarizes some methods that I know about.
| FrontPage 97 | Navigator Gold | FTP clients | MKS Web Integrity | Microsoft Publishing Wizard | |
| Publishing Protocols Supported | FrontPage (HTTP "POST" to CGI) | FTP Netscape one-button publishing (HTTP "PUT") |
FTP | Uses proprietary server extension | FTP |
| Web server requirements | Must have FrontPage server extensions loaded on Web server | Must use a Net scape Web server or Website for Netscape one-button publishing | Any Web server running on a system with an FTP server | Microsoft IIS or Netscape web server | Any Web server running on a system with an FTP server |
Microsoft FrontPage
Microsoft's FrontPage has its own, proprietary, method of publishing to Web servers that uses a CGI program running on the server host. Commands are sent from the FrontPage client to the FrontPage server using the HTTP "POST" command. Web publishing using the FrontPage client requires that FrontPage server extensions be installed on the Web server.
Extensions for supported Web servers can be found here
. If you buy into the FrontPage solution, you have to hope that Microsoft keeps making server extensions for your favorite
server unless, of course, you're running Microsoft's Web servers, such as Internet Information Server (IIS) or Microsoft Personal Web Server for Windows 95.
In any case, FrontPage offers a lot of power and flexibility in its extensions, but it's really overkill for many people. Personally, I don't like all the files and directories that FrontPage sticks into your site. Of course, FrontPage uses those directories to hold state information about your Web site and to manage access to individual files and directories, but for the purposes of simply publishing a file to the Web site, it's a lot more than anyone needs. Here's what some of those directories look like viewed through the Windows NT Explorer. All the ones that start with an underscore ("_") character were created by the FrontPage server extensions.
FrontPage97, the latest version of FrontPage from Microsoft, keeps you in constant contact with your target Web server. When you start
up FrontPage, you choose the machine where your server is located. The dialog box for this selection looks like this:
FrontPage 1.1 has its own encryption, which it uses for client-server communication. Microsoft admits the encryption is not hacker-proof . The company suggests using Secure Sockets Layer (SSL), which is available in FrontPage 97. SSL, by the way, is also not hacker-proof. (Is anything hacker proof?) Oh, well.
Netscape One-Button Publishing
Netscape initiated the whole Web publishing brouhaha in the spring of 1996 with the release of Navigator Gold 2.0, which introduced a new feature called one-button publishing. It's cool. You can edit documents inside Navigator Gold's HTML editor and then select "Publish" from the "File" menu to write the modified file directly back to the Web site.
After you select "Publish" from Navigator Gold's menu, you get the following dialog box:
Notice that the dialog box lets you use either FTP or HTTP to write (upload) files back to the server. If you choose HTTP, you need to have a Netscape Web server (or O'Reilly and Associates' Website) on the receiving end. The HTTP "PUT" command is used to write files back to the server. "PUT" is a standard part of the HTTP 1.0 protocol that every Web server implements. So why do you need to use Netscape's Web server? Because although the HTTP PUT command is standard, the mechanism that your server uses for client authorization is not standard. For authorization to work, the server must negotiate the user name and password with the client. Microsoft and other vendors have chosen different mechanisms to implement username and password authentication. Fortunately, the HTTP 1.1 specification , which became an official standard last month, offers a clearer way to manage username and password authentication between client and Web server, and it is likely that future browsers and servers that understand the HTTP 1.1 protocol will all implement interoperable one-button publishing.
The Least Common Denominator
FTP is the age-old standard that we've all come to know and love. It's also a big security risk. Any administrator who opens his Web site to FTP traffic is adding one more opening for hackers. Unfortunately, for the many Internet service providers that run Unix-based Web servers such as Apache, FTP is the only option for Web publishing. It's also supported from within client tools such as Netscape Navigator Gold and the forthcoming Netscape Communicator, as well as Microsoft's Publishing Wizard. There is also, of course, lots of FTP client software for virtually every platform.
( By the way, for those FrontPage fans who read my description above and say it ain't so, let me clarify: If you try to publish to a Web site that doesn't have the FrontPage server extensions loaded, FrontPage will try to use the Microsoft Web Publishing Wizard, a separate program that uses FTP, to publish to the Web site. However, certain features of FrontPage, such as its WebBots, won't be published if you use the Wizard.)
When everyone has implemented the new HTTP 1.1 protocol in their Web browsers and servers, we may yet see cross-platform implementations of one-button publishing that will make software easier for the average user. For the time being though, we've got a mishmash of methods that's just a bit confusing. OK, so maybe it is just technical minutiae.
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