Indirect references

It often seems that URL's point to (moved) locations... it kind of 
reminds me of the garbage collection problem in Lisp, in which data 
can be moved around in memory and all active pointers must be 
updated.

 One solution (not a good one) would be to treat it the same way, and have a
 GC web walker which re-points moved URL's; obviously this is fraught with 
problems.

However, an indirect referencing scheme might go a long way towards 
solving this problem.  Rather than:

        <A HREF="http://www.blah/foo.html">
which is an "absolute" pointer, perhaps a syntax change allowing 
dynamic lookup would solve the problem:
       <A HREF="www.blah.foo.html@index-server.com" ...>

The idea is that to resolve the HREF, (in this case) index-server.com 
is asked for the *current* location of www.blah.foo.html (syntax here 
needs some thought).  This way, one could move pages around, update 
pointers on whatever index server one uses, and all existing pointers 
would still work.

I'm sending it to this list as I think this kind of change is 
primarily syntactic; the functionality to implement it would be 
minimal.

(I'm new to this list; in fact, I haven't yet subscribed, so:
  1.  I apologize if I missed this thought in the archives; and
  2. Until I'm subscribed, I'd appreciate responses to me at 
bentz@ai.mit.edu.)

Bryan A. Bentz     H: (617) 932-7940   bentz@ai.mit.edu
T.H.I.             W: (617) 932-8233
6 Gately Drive     
Woburn, MA 01801
URL: http://www-swiss.ai.mit.edu/~bentz/bentz.html

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Received on Saturday, 2 March 1996 13:25:34 UTC