Add flag to ignore `index.html` resolution in gateway

[RangerMauve]

At the moment, if I want to do a directory listing using an HTTP request to a gateway, I cannot do anything if there is an index.html file inside a given path.

It would be nice to be able to specify a flag in the querystring (eg, ?noResolve) to skip the resolution of index.html and to do a regular directory read.

This is something I've played with a bit in js-ipfs-fetch using a custom header, but that doesn't play well with CORS and I've since learned that querystrings are much more reliable/ usable (in hypercore-fetch).

Is this something that could be considered for addition?

[lidel]

Notes from triage:

• sounds useful
• Food for thought: reuse format: ?format=dir-index-html
  • not sure how to represent it as Accept header (i'd like to have a symmetry similar to car and raw which can be requested both ways)

[RangerMauve]

format=dir-index-html seems very specific to how the IPFS gateway currently works. Is it expected that all gateway implementations will use the same HTML rendering behavior whenever index.html rendering is disabled?

For example, in Agregore the default is to render a plain JSON Array of file/subfolder paths and to render an index HTML only if the Accept header says it's taking text/html.

Personally, I'd like to decouple the index.html rendering behavior from whatever the default rendering/indexing functionality is. 😅

Else it'd be nice if we could find a way to standardize the JSON based directory listing thing Agregore does (it's different than downloading the raw DAG-JSON of the directory)

[ivan386]

XML directory listing will be useful to.

[Jorropo]

XML directory listing will be useful to.

IMO, XML is a pain to deal with, I agree with this but using json and / or cbor.