Re: URLs in web-based groupware

Considering only the reasons you cited for a user to want to mainly use a particular server, it seems a possible solution is to distinguish between the URL for an item's "full presentation" (which includes the decorations for navigation, cookies for managing the conversation between client and server, etc) and the URL for the item itself.  E.g., think of the full presentation as having frames, one of which contains the item.  The full presentation is specific to a particular server; the item itself has just one URL and you don't care where it is.

There are even more reasons for wanting a family of "equivalent" URLs, and these are a general problem on the web.  The classic example is motivated by mirroring, where you want each user to be fetching from a "nearby" mirror and yet everybody communicates with URLs that are not mirror-specific.

Received on Monday, 15 February 1999 11:22:47 UTC