Re: Project Gutenberg's Roget's Thesaurus
Guido.van.Rossum@cwi.nl
Message-id: <9304131637.AA24791=guido@voorn.cwi.nl>
To: timbl@nxoc01.cern.ch
Cc: www-talk@nxoc01.cern.ch
Subject: Re: Project Gutenberg's Roget's Thesaurus
In-reply-to: Your message of "Tue, 13 Apr 1993 18:07:08 MDT."
<9304131707.AA05778@www3.cern.ch>
From: Guido.van.Rossum@cwi.nl
X-Organization: CWI (Centrum voor Wiskunde en Informatica)
X-Address: P.O. Box 4079, 1009 AB Amsterdam, The Netherlands
X-Phone: +31 20 5924127 (work), +31 20 6225521 (home), +31 20 5924199 (fax)
Date: Tue, 13 Apr 1993 18:37:17 +0200
Sender: Guido.van.Rossum@cwi.nl
>As more public domain hypertext comes on line, we are going to need
>some big disks on each continent for it. We should also perhaps use
>some mirroring software to keep them up to date.
I see a problem coming here: how does an unreplicated document (say my
own home page) mane a reference to such a replicated document? If I
have a reference to the closest replica, a user far away who follows
such a link will get pointed to the replica closest to *me*, not
closest to her.
Some possible solutions:
- a translation scheme whereby clients "know" (e.g. from a local
configuration file that may be updated automatically as mirror sites
are added) that information at host X is identical to info at host Y
- a magic string in hostnames that is translated dependent on the
geographical position of the client (e.g.
http://info-cern.closestmirror/...)
- upon first contact with a server, it might respond with "please
try the following mirror site which is closer to you" (this could be
put in HTTP2 I suppose).
This is a real problem with embedding location information in URLs...
--Guido van Rossum, CWI, Amsterdam <Guido.van.Rossum@cwi.nl>