Re: Decision about Host?

M. Hedlund writes:
> At 4:52 PM 10/5/95, Balint Nagy Endre wrote:
> >>Jeffrey Mogul writes: [...]
> >> Good point about the current naming schemes.  But then what does it
> >> mean if a client sends:
> >>
> >>       Host: www
> >>
> >> To me, this is an error, and the server can report it as such.
> >> What else could it possibly do? [...]
> >
> >300 Multipe choices would be fine.
> 
> Not if the provider wished to make one or more of the choices semi-private
> (i.e., only available by explicit request).  Also, in the case Andrew
> mentioned -- where an ISP wishes to give each of many customers an unique
> domain name -- there could be many, many choices available.  (See
> <URL:ftp://ftp.netcom.com/pub/>, if you can get to it.)
As I can recall, ftp.netcom.com has a really long pub dir. I hope no one
ISP is willing to open www.user.isp.net for all of its individual users.
You can expect too many choices only if you want to get http://www/.
If you want to get something different, the there will be significantly less
candidates. Most often only one of them will have ~user for any user name.
But your semi-privacy requirement suggests that in case of ambiguity
300 response SHOULD be returned. (Instead of the proposed MUST.)

Andrew. (Endre Balint Nagy) <bne@bne.ind.eunet.hu>