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Re: good practice for clients

Martin Hamilton says
>"N.G.Smith" writes:
>
>| For those who don't follow uk newsgroups, this comes after some heated
>| discussion, where I was trying to encourage users of caches to accept
>| the fact that they were at least partly to blame in the case where
>| their WWW access was interrupted by their browser's inability to
>| degrade gracefully in the light of a proxy failure.
>
>Well, you did kind of imply that everyone ought to be running Netscape >
>= v2 ! <ducks>

Or encouraging their browser authors to implement more sensible behaviour.

>One particular problem I've seen here and there is with resolvers only 
>returning a single IP address even though there are several associated 
>with the DNS entry.  Caching DNS lookups for the duration of the 
>session (e.g. while DOS TSR loaded), even if the address(es) stop 
>working, can also be a bit of a bugger.
>
>I may be being pointing the finger at the wrong culprit here, though - 
>perhaps it's the browser or the TCP/IP implementation which isn't doing 
>anything with those multiple IP addresses, and they are all being 
>returned by the DNS lookup ?

I'd guess that it is mostly the browsers. In any case the browser can
always do another lookup.

>| >Does the above sound reasonable as a baseline ?  I realise that this
>| >stuff isn't universally supported, but that's another story!
>| 
>| I find it unbelievable that it isn't universally supported.
>
>Yep - in-lined infomercials must be a higher priority!

This doesn't explain it. Browsers have been around for a lot longer
than that. Why weren't the first generation of browsers built with this
kind of support from day one.

>PS I think it would be quite useful if the CERN server were capable of 
>surviving the outer proxy's death automatically, e.g. by using other 
>proxies and/or direct connections.  Before I get out my lame 
>programmer's hacking kit, does anyone have patches to make it do this ? 
> Haven't come across any...

Not seen anything like this myself.

Something I've not had a chance to follow is the W3C libraries. If the
LineMode browser has support for multiple IP addresses on a hostname,
is the code not already there? What does Arena do for example?

Neil Smith
HENSA Unix
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