Re: Question...

From: Dancer <dancer@dont-contact.us>
Date: Thu, 16 Sep 1999 09:39:24 +1000

Jorge Moreno Bustamante wrote:
>
> Hello. I'm trying to make Squid open pages with hidden script
> attached on them.

At the risk of sounding cruel: Ha. Hahahaha.
Been there. Done that. Got the tee-shirt, the gray hair and shot the
stuffed toy.

> Is there an easy way to do this?

No.

> When a user opens for
> example www.yahoo.com I want squid to also open other window or frame or
> insert a script before the page requested.. is this possible?..

Yes.

> is there
> an easy way to do it?..

No.

> I hope you maybe could help me with this
> issue. Thank you very much.

The first thing I recommend is that you abandon this idea.

I've done it, and short of writing a very smart proxy capable of
scanning and modifying HTML on the fly, it's not going to work properly.
There are fairly simple modifications you can make to squid to do this
sort of thing: THEY DO NOT WORK PROPERLY.

To insert your stuff on pages without some very sophisticated management
of code-insertion will simply break many pages. I've been there. I know.
It looks all very good until the complaints start coming in...and you
try to fix individual pages, and the number of complaints keep
increasing...and then you discover that inserting code before the body
tag screws up about half the sites if the user is using MSIE4.x

And that's just the _beginning_ of your problems.

Right now, I'm finishing the design for version 3.0 of my proxy code for
a thing that does this. It's a part of one of our products. I've spent
about six months of 80+ hour weeks on different versions. If you try for
an easy solution, you'll end up paying for man-years of programmer-time
(not to mention support).

Give it up, or write a proxy with an expert system built in. Really.

D
Received on Wed Sep 15 1999 - 17:48:07 MDT

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