On Fri, Feb 27, 2015 at 09:45:10PM +0100, Patrik Fältström wrote:
On 27 feb 2015, at 21:37, Nico Williams <nico(_at_)cryptonector(_dot_)com>
wrote:
On Fri, Feb 27, 2015 at 08:07:25AM +0100, Patrik Fältström wrote:
My feedback to Andrew when he presented this to me was that:
- In general I am nervous of moving HTTP header attributes into the
DNS, as it might create inconsistencies when for example the data in
DNS do not match what is in the HTTP header, and we already have a
content-negotiation mechanism in HTTP
If anything, it may not provide the optimization that's desired. (Any
numbers?)
Ok, to go back in history, this is why I originally did believe more
in Gopher than Web... :-)
But I wanted current numbers, as in performance numbers :)
I though a proper negotiation would be to know already in the source
of a referral what kind of data the target was. This was how Gopher
worked, but Web was different. The link was (is) neutral and the
negotiation happens at the target.
Very large references would have been unwieldy in HTML back then.
Content-addressed storage is still unwieldy for cross-domain
referencing, and always will be.
That story, early 1990's, gave me the lesson that the "correct"
solutions do not always win. The "best" solution wins.
That's hardly the only case, and I'm not sure that your approach would
have been more correct. The more metadata [about a target resource] you
put into the referring entity's content, the better the chances of the
reference going stale. Content-addressing is an extreme example of
this, though for your approach I guess one would have used some fuzzy
matching (which is not applicable to content-addressing).
And this is the reason I am nervous over "gopher like features" in
DNS. Even though I think it is good...I think it will loose...
I don't think that's a good enough reason here. There may be other
reasons to tread carefully here.
Nico
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