[Techtalk] Using a web browser to control stuff locally -eek!

[esme]

On Saturday 20 Aug 2005 03:26, Kathryn Andersen wrote:
> On Sat, Aug 20, 2005 at 12:24:52AM +0100, esme wrote:
> > How do you invoke a shell command from a web page?

I've just looked up what CGI means.  Damn! All I had to do on the Amiga was 
create an ML page which I could either create to point at contents on the 
Amiga itself, or include with multimedia files and players on the same floppy 
disk as the ML file itself... my friend inserts floppy in their Amiga, opens 
up the ML file in their browser, and voila! They have a hypertext document 
that includes multimedia stuff that can be invoked simply by clicking on a 
button.  Or, friend comes along and uses my PC, clicks on desktop icon and 
gets a ML page that does the same thing playing stuff off my Amigas hard 
drive. 

It was pretty damned easy to do on the Amiga once you'd learnt the markup 
language.  Isn't it so easy using Linux, then?  (I do realise that I'd need 
to consider permissions, but that's OK - I understand those. Oh, and no, I am 
NOT wanting folk out on the internet to be able to play stuff off of my 
machine  - just people either sat at my computer or on the LAN it's (going to 
be) connected to).

Esme