HTTP support for TeX? was: Re: [tex-live] Re: schedule for tl2004

[Stefan Ulrich]

Hans Hagen <pragma at wxs.nl> writes:

> At 03:00 08/05/2004, Olaf Weber wrote:
>> To do
>> 
>> - some of the stuff above is not yet documented.
>> - Makefile glitches.

> any chance on \input http://someplace.somewhere.org/test.tex

> being supported (currently only on windows)

Are many people actually using this feature? To me it doesn't
sound terribly useful and rather difficult to implement (using
a library like libcurl or libwww?)

I'm saying this mainly because we used to have similar
functionality in xdvik (using libwww), but we finally removed it
again since it was so bloated, buggy and also generally useless
since most people are more comfortable using a real web browser
to browse the web.

I would imagine that it would be even more difficult to use in a
non-GUI program. E.g. do users get a progress indicator of the
download? What if the server doesn't respond or hangs during the
download? Can you customize the timeouts?  What if you need to
enter a password for a password-protected site?

-- 
Stefan Ulrich