Re: locating policy reference files

> On Tuesday 24 April 2001 15:38, you wrote:
> > Even in the scenario you describe, the host company can include
> > a policy reference file that provides the policies for all the content
> > it hosts.
> Theoretically the host company could, but usually it does not know the
> structure of the subtree (or policies covering different parts of this
> subtree respectively) a foreign company is responsible for. All they can
do
> is therefore explicitely say that everything below the root of this
subtree
> is out of their responsibility. Otherwise the host company would have to
> adjust *its* policy reference file everytime the *foreign company* changes
> the structure of its subtree/system of policies; which is most certainly
not
> what we want.

Certainly true. However, we expect that for the most part hosted content
will be things like image files, that in most cases will all have the same
policy applying to them. If a company is going to have their entire
site hosted elsewhere, they are likely to use virtual hosting, which
would give them their own domain name and avoid this problem. Of
course there are exceptions.

> My suggestion was, that the host company just excludes the subtree from
its
> policy reference file (avoiding the 1000 entries problem, see below) and
the
> foreign company puts its policy reference file in the root of its subtree.

We had considered this -- in fact, this is essentially what the PICS
spec allows. We decided not to go down this route because of
the added complexity (first you look in /w3c/, if no PRF is there you
look in /foo/w3c/, if no PRF is there you lookin /foo/bar/w3c/ etc....
how far do you go before you give up? Or maybe we say that
you can put the PRF in either the root /w3c/directory or in a sub directory
where the content is, but nowhere else -- so for /foo/bar/content.html
you would look in /foo/bar/w3c/ if the PRF in /w3c doesn't apply), and
because it does not appear that it is a very common case that would
be needed for real web sites. If someone demonstrates that in fact
there are a lot of real web sites that would find this useful, the working
group would look at this again.

> > Also, we have been told by some of the content distribution networks
> > that their file system is not actually hierarchical, so it is not as
> > simple as identifying each client with a directory.
> Im not quit sure what you mean by "not actually hierarchical". But I think
> even if a content distribution network has a filesystem that is physically
> organised in some non-hierarchical way there must be a mapping to a
logical
> hierarchy, since URLs are hierarchically interpretated.

I had assumed that if cdn.com  hosts content for foo.com and bar.com, that
there would be some directory structure such as cdn.com/foo/ and
cdn.com/bar/
where all the files from foo and bar are located. But we've heard from at
least one CDN that in fact they use some hashing algorithm and so what
you really get are things like cdn.com/15390u/3048038_foo_39483048.html
as file names. There might be some string that is common to all the file
names belonging to company foo, but they aren't all going to be put
in a common directory.

Lorrie

Received on Thursday, 26 April 2001 09:28:09 UTC