Netinvite Protocol.

The purpose of the "Netinvite Protocol" is to give the providers of timely events the ability to place changing links on other websites.

Let us look at a specific example:

On the top right corner of the page http://www.cafearoma.org/cal (The Calendar of Cafe Aroma) you see a little picture describing the movie currently showing at the Rustic Theater. If you click on the picture, your browser opens a new window showing you a specific page of the website of the Rustic Theater. The user of the web is more likely to click on a link if he/she knows in advance that there is something new and interesting at the destination of the link.

The "Netinvite Protocol" has the following characteristics:
The maintainer of the website calendar of Cafe Aroma controls the size and position of the invite picture but neither its content nor its destination link. Moreover the maintainer of the Aroma Calendar does not have to do anything when the picture or destination link are changed by the webmaster of the Rustic Theater.

Let us look how this is implemented.
The webmaster of the Rustic Theater creates a folder www.therustic.com/invite and places in it the files www.therustic.com/invite/invite.jpg and www.therustic.com/invite/index.html .
The file www.therustic.com/invite/invite.jpg contains a picture describing the current movie and the file www.therustic.com/invite/index.html contains code redirecting the user to the appropriate page on the Rustic Theater website. The picture can be a gif or a jpg, BUT IT MUST BE NAMED invite.jpg .

The file www.therustic.com/invite/index.html contains the following lines: 
<html><head>
<meta http-equiv="refresh" content=" 0; URL= http://therustic.com/news/index.html">
</head></html>
The Webmaster of the Rustic Theater changes the content of the image file www.therustic.com/invite/invite.jpg to match the movie currently showing at the Rustic Theater and ,perhaps, changes the words http://therustic.com/news/index.html in the file www.therustic.com/invite/index.html to redirect the user to another part of the website of the Rustic Theater.

The maintainer of the Cafe Aroma website (or the maintainer of any other website) includes the code: 
<a href="http://www.therustic.com/invite" target="_blank">
<img src="http://www.therustic.com/invite/invite.jpg" height="150" width="250">
</a>
at some appropriate place.

For more information please contact Hubert Halkin .

Copyright 2004 Hubert Halkin .