Re: Project Gutenberg's Roget's Thesaurus

marca@ncsa.uiuc.edu (Marc Andreessen)
Date: Tue, 13 Apr 93 12:42:01 -0500
From: marca@ncsa.uiuc.edu (Marc Andreessen)
Message-id: <9304131742.AA20897@wintermute.ncsa.uiuc.edu>
To: Guido.van.Rossum@cwi.nl
Cc: timbl@nxoc01.cern.ch, www-talk@nxoc01.cern.ch
Subject: Re: Project Gutenberg's Roget's Thesaurus 
In-reply-to: <9304131637.AA24791=guido@voorn.cwi.nl>
References: <9304131637.AA24791=guido@voorn.cwi.nl>
	<9304131707.AA05778@www3.cern.ch>
X-Md4-Signature: df0b5b5bae12b8e41c525b79d94b22ed

Guido.van.Rossum@cwi.nl writes:
> >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...

Sounds like it's time to move URN's (or whatever persistent Internet
resource identifiers are being called these days) out of the theory
stage and into practice.... anyone know what the status of the URN
work that was/is apparently going somewhere in the IETF?

Marc

--
Marc Andreessen
Software Development Group
National Center for Supercomputing Applications
marca@ncsa.uiuc.edu