From: mitra@path.net (Mitra)
Date: Thu, 28 Oct 1993 18:36:52 PST
In-Reply-To: Peter Deutsch <peterd@bunyip.com>
To: peterd@bunyip.com, marca@ncsa.uiuc.edu
Subject: Re: Thumbnail Sketch of the UR* Arena
Message-Id: <9310281836.aa29899@pandora.sf.ca.us>
Peter
I'm glad you made this proposal, and think it a reasonable contender.
Certainly better than having half a dozen different protocols.
I'd ask you to flesh out some details for it to be considered.
1) Is their software available to do this, (not a kit, but a real
peice of portable - publicly available code). Not that I'm asking you
to give away your code, but if its available it makes it a better contender :-)
2) Exactly what extensions to DNS would be needed to make this work, I'm
presuming it could be handled by C calls to DNS routines, since we cant
expect every client to implement the DNS. I dont quite understand your
detailed proposal, but it might be that we can do this by just adding
information to the DNS - and making standard "gethostbyname" calls.
3) How would whois++ return something looking like either Mike, My, or
Ole's nested templates, Previous whois++ documents didnt look like
they could handle this.
4) What extensions would be needed to handle calls such as
"Register this URL as a location for this URN"
It would be really good to see similar responses from Rob (DNS) and
Marca (HTTP), including a detailed example of a sample interaction
from the time a client receives a URN to the time it can call a
access library (e.g. a call to Prospero to return a gopher item).
Personally I'd committ to do development work with whatever consensus
we could reach on a scheme to use.
I think that other networks - e.g.
Gopher could easily implement gateways, for example a Gopher URN->URL
mapping service that talked Gopher to a Gopher client, and did the
whole lookup and retrieval to return a Gopher menu of URL's (with
meta information converted into Gopher).
- Mitra