Re: DNS vs HOME PAGE[S]?
Simon E Spero (ses@tipper.oit.unc.edu)
Mon, 13 Feb 1995 22:30:01 -0500 (EST)
Just two quick comments on home pages and DNS;
1) home pages.
(I've been following the discussion under the assumption that the aim of
the exercise is to allow marketers to advertise a URL of http://foo.com/
instead of http://foo.com/foo/ for cases where several companies share a
web server)
Changing the spec to require full URL qualification still means that
non-1.1 browsers would still send hostless requests. A company
advertising its homepage would still need to give a url that could be
handled by 1.0 clients, making the whole point a bit moot.
2) DNS
Rob Raisch mentioned how hard it is to get any changes made to DNS.
Fortunately, DNS already contains a godawful hack, thanks to those
awfully nice Athena people. Nearly all DNS servers support TXT records,
which can be used to hold all sorts of nice strings (passwd file entries,
etc. etc.). It'd be easy to set up a convention of sticking a prefix onto
a hostname for an http-server (e.g. http-info.sunsite.unc.edu.), and
putting an extra question in the dns request the client sends off to do the
hostname lookup. This technique doesn't help the homepage problem, as it
has the same backwards compatibility headaches as mentioned before, but
it's an interesting way of doing things like versioning and
back-compatibility.
Simon
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