Indirect references -Reply

Don't redirects solve that?  I mean, if you're running
a spider (I run MOMspider) you'll see the redirects
and update the links.

I thought everyone was doing this.   What I do 
is run MOMspider once a week, and update
redirected links to their new location.  If I change
the location of my pages, I usually re-direct for a while,
then stop (since everyone else who was running a
spider has noticed that the location has changed).

Also, a lot of servers have virtual paths, so you 
could be doing the same thing with that.

>>> Bryan A. Bentz <bentz@martigny.ai.mit.edu> - 3/2/96 10:26 AM >>>
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 17:21:16 UTC