We are experiencing momentary technical difficultes, please stand by...

sg04%kesser@gte.com
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Date: Fri, 1 Apr 1994 19:03:26 --100
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Subject: We are experiencing momentary technical difficultes, please stand by...
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Currently, as in the case below, if a host goes down, or
there is something wrong with the disks, one has little
information about what has occured, till one can find an
alternate channel to contact the maintainer:

----- Begin Included Message -----

>From abragad@di.unipi.it Fri Apr  1 06:20:56 1994
Date: Fri, 1 Apr 94 13:22:16 +0200
From: abragad@di.unipi.it
To: sg04@gte.com
Subject: Re: Icon directories
Newsgroups: comp.infosystems.www
Organization: Dipartimento di Informatica, Universita' di Pisa

In article <CnJDyJ.735@gte.com> you wrote:
: I have seen in the past some WWW pages with directories
: of icons. However, these links seem to have gotton stale.

Yep. Disk crash for www.di.unipi.it. 
We will try to fix it as soon as we can (but I don't think
it will be very soon).
--
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
             Alessio F. Bragadini - Universita` di Pisa, Europa
                            abragad@di.unipi.it
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------


Ok, you tell me, URN's will be persistant and will re-direct me
around this temporary outages. But until that happens, could
we not come up with mechanism for reporting:

"We are experiencing momentary technical difficultes, please stand by..."
with a brief message about what the nature of the problem is and
who can be contacted. 

Perhaps there could be a high-availability site(s) with replicated
data where HTTP server maintainers could deposit information about
server difficulites. This could even be automated to an extent,
with the site "ping'ing" registered http servers, reporting
their availability. Also the Clients could search there whenever
a connection times out.

Until we have URN's this would be a big advantage in making WWW
more accessable to the general public, who expects some sort
of "We are experiencing momentary technical difficultes, please stand by..."
message when things are not working.

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