Message-Id: <9404272357.AA11186@expresso.bunyip.com>
From: Peter Deutsch <peterd@bunyip.com>
Date: Wed, 27 Apr 1994 19:57:52 -0400
In-Reply-To: Martin Hamilton's message as of Apr 27, 18:54
To: Martin Hamilton <martin@mrrl.lut.ac.uk>, uri@bunyip.com
Subject: Re: Selecting URL from "equal" sites
Hi all,
[ Martin wrote: ]
. . .
> FWIW, xarchie has a neat technique that lets you sort the results of
> archie searches according to weights placed on domain names, e.g. for me
> things in "uk" are generally preferable to things in "au" or "jp".
> Something like this would probably be a useful feature in any client
> which is going to deal with URCs
FWIW, this is actually a feature of the archie 3.x server.
It's just that not all the clients support it yet. It is
possible to do this in the telnet client, as well (and for
those who don't know it yet, it is also now possible to
supply a path specifier, as well).
Give the above, I think it is a major challenge for client
designers to figure out the best way to present such
functionality to users in a particular environment. As has
been discussed in the past, I think it is a separate major
challenge to decide where such functionality is best
performed. In this case, we added selection options to the
server to reduce the volume of responses that the client
must deal with. For such things as calculating the "best"
server for a client to use, I think such functionality is
best handled at the client. It usually has cycles to burn
while waiting for a response and it is far better placed
to determine the appropriate path.
We now return to normal programming...
- peterd
--
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"What do thay got, a whole lot of sand? We got a hot crustacean band!
Each little clam here, know how to jam here! Under the Sea!"
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------