Re: disabling 'insecure' parts of gnuplot file

[Ethan M. <merritt@u.washington.edu>]

On Tuesday 31 August 2004 04:31 pm, Edward Peschko wrote:
> 
> Because the whole idea was to make it so:
> 
> 	a) other people can reproduce the graph
> 	b) other people can see the data used to generate the graph
> 	c) other people can modify the data used to generate the graph, or modify
>            the layout.
> 
> You lose lots in the translation to the PNG - just like you lose lots when you
> edit an illustrator or PSP file and don't save it in their native format.

True.
There is another option that I have found useful in the past.
It would achieve exactly what you describe above, but it 
does assume that the script is trusted. What you can do  
is to associate the mime type "application/gnuplot" with 
a gnuplot wrapper script, and have the web site return the
script itself via a browser click.  This is the ultimate in not
losing anything to translation.  For details, see
	
http://www.bmsc.washington.edu/people/merritt/gnuplot_test.html

In my case the script on the server side is trusted, so the
issues you are worried about are not of primary concern.
The data being plotted can either be local to the user's machine,
or can be pulled from the web site via http protocols.
If the data were on a wiki site, my procedure would allow 
your (a), (b) and (c) above.


-- 
Ethan A Merritt       merritt@u.washington.edu
Biomolecular Structure Center
Mailstop 357742
University of Washington, Seattle, WA 98195