Re: Proposal: New Anchor attributes

You, Ron Schnell wrote:
++ 
++ This is my first posting to the list...hopefully I'm not repeating
++ someone else's idea...
++ 
++ I would like to propose two new attributes for the Anchor element.
++ 
++ They are:
++ 
++ 1.  ALT=[URL]
++ This attribute would specify an alternate URL should the HREF be
++ unavailable.
++ 
++ 2.  TIMEOUT=[seconds]
++ This attribute would specify an amount of time, after which a
++ browser should give up on the HREF.

But how can the author know what is an acceptable time out? If I'm
at the end of a noisy and busy link, a 30 second response might be
_fast_, but for the author living on his T3, 15 seconds might be the
limit. 

++ Neither of these would require the other, but each would be more
++ useful with the other.
++ 
++ These two attributes would add some redundancy to web pages
++ (locations) that desire to have it.  In these times of "high
++ availability" being such an "important issue", I think that this
++ would be strongly embraced by government and commercial entities.

I think a more general object naming scheme could solve that.
Currently, one has to give the location of the server, and the
address of the object on the server. A more general naming scheme
could introduce an extra mapping layer. For instance:
HREF = "xxx:CPAN" would point to the nearest mirror of the CPAN
archive. It might even take unreachable servers into account.
Could URNs deal with this?



Abigail

-- 
<URL: http://www.edbo.com/abigail/>

Received on Monday, 27 May 1996 21:38:03 UTC