Re: DNS vs HOME PAGE[S]?

Just two quick comments on home pages and DNS; 

1) home pages.

(I've been following the discussion under the assumption that the aim of 
the exercise is to allow marketers to advertise a URL of http://foo.com/
instead of  http://foo.com/foo/ for cases where several companies share a 
web server)

Changing the spec to require full URL qualification  still means that 
non-1.1 browsers would still send hostless requests. A company 
advertising its homepage would still need to give a url that could be 
handled by 1.0 clients, making the whole point a bit moot. 

2) DNS

Rob Raisch mentioned how hard it is to get any changes made to DNS. 
Fortunately, DNS already contains a godawful hack, thanks to those 
awfully nice Athena people. Nearly all DNS servers support TXT records, 
which can be used to hold all sorts of nice strings (passwd file entries, 
etc. etc.). It'd be easy to set up a convention of sticking a prefix onto 
a hostname for an http-server (e.g. http-info.sunsite.unc.edu.), and 
putting an extra question in the dns request the client sends off to do the
hostname lookup. This technique doesn't help the homepage problem, as it 
has the same backwards compatibility headaches as mentioned before, but 
it's an interesting way of doing things like versioning and 
back-compatibility.

Simon

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Received on Monday, 13 February 1995 19:32:57 UTC