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Re: novel use of URL space

2000-07-27 23:00:05
operationally, useably, ... how is this more useful than putting the rfc
after the slash, e.g.

you can set up different sets of mirrors for each RFC.
(with different maintainers and/or different TTLs for each set)
you can delegate each RFC to a different DNS zone
(not so useful for RFCs but might be useful for other kinds of documents)

so for instance you can replicate a document to several mirrors
(each represented by an A record) and have the A records for 
that document get updated each time a new replica is created.  
(or each time a replica is destroyed). that way, you have a 
high probability that the mirror server you go to to fetch a
particular document will actually have the document you want.

yes, you can more-or-less do that with HTTP also, using redirects,
but the lookup overhead is higher with HTTP, and DNS has better
support for replication between servers.    so it's probably 
more robust to us DNS

Keith

p.s. otoh, there are subtle differences in the way that relative URLs work 
between the two cases.  if a document is referenced as

http://rfcXXXX.x42.com/ 

then a relative URL of the form "rfcYYYY" presumably won't 
work right (absent the server for XXXX generating a redirect) 

but if you reference it as

http://x42.com/rfcXXXX

then "rfcYYYY" presumably will work if the server mirrors all 
of the RFCs.

so putting the document ID within the DNS name sort of defeats
relative addressing.  whether this is a bug or a feature depends
on your point of view.



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