Multiple URL's for HREF, SRC and ACTION

Marc Salomon (marc@matahari.ckm.ucsf.edu)
Fri, 17 Nov 1995 10:59:40 -0800


One well-understood problem with using URL's to point to data objects
(reference by location) is that things move and some services are by nature
ephemeral.

Since all URLs that are in HREF, SRC or ACTION must be escaped, and spaces are
among the characters escaped, it would seem syntactically possible to permit
multiple space-separated URL's as values to these attributes. Semantically, a
user agent would then have one or more alternative pointers to a resource in
the case where the first one(s) were unavailable.

The <A HREF="http://www.w3.org/pub/WWW/MarkUp/html-spec/html.dtd
ftp://ftp.ckm.ucsf.edu/pub/html/html.dtd"> HTML DTD </A> is widely available.

or

<FORM ACTION="http://my.session.server/transaction?do+this+for+me
http://generic.sesion.server/back_from_the_dead">

This currently doesn't blow up on both netscape 1.x and xmosaic 2.7.latest,
although the BASE must be set in the referenced document so that inlines' URL's
are not prefixed with the full contents of the HREF and correctly resolved.

-marc

-- 
Marc Salomon