- From: Albert Lunde <Albert-Lunde@nwu.edu>
- Date: Thu, 17 Nov 1994 12:38:38 -0600 (CST)
- To: Chuck Shotton <cshotton@oac.hsc.uth.tmc.edu>
- Cc: http-wg%cuckoo.hpl.hp.com@hplb.hpl.hp.com
> >Everything you say is true from a technical point of view. However,
> >the issue here is a political/commercial one. When a company
> >contracts with a service provider to create a WWW presence they want
> >the URL for their company to be something like
> >
> > http://company_name.com/
>
> This is an apples and oranges discussion. An alias name in the DNS for a
> computer has very little to do with Web servers or HTTP. There is NO change
> needed to HTTP request syntax to accomodate this. As I said before, clients
The issue in question is not that of using CNAME aliases (which provide
different names for the same service), but one of providing different
services on the same machine, all with (vanity) addresses
of the form above.
I _think_ this is currently done at a few sites with a feature of
the BSD ifconfig that allows one interface to accept traffic on
multiple IP addresses on one interface, then hacking the server
to serve up different web pages for the different IP addresses.
It's an ugly hack, but there is a demand. I personally doubt this
can be "fixed" in the HTTP protocol because of the problem of supporting
old clients, and because this is, in effect, trying to subvert the meaning
of the DNS in the context of URLs.
--
Albert Lunde Albert-Lunde@nwu.edu
Received on Thursday, 17 November 1994 10:40:33 UTC