Re: Multiple URL's for HREF, SRC and ACTION

Martin Hamilton (martin@mrrl.lut.ac.uk)
Mon, 20 Nov 1995 18:52:15 +0000


Gregory Woodhouse writes:

| Actually, spaces should be escaped in URLs, anyway. Okay, okay, the tilde is
| technically an unsafe chaacter as well, so I'm stubborn (see my signature).

;-)

| That being said, I like this idea. It would allow us to specify mirror sites
| which would be tried either if the primary site was down or if it times out.
| I'm not quite sure how to handle time outs though, I suspect that once the
| dat tansfer begins, you'll probably want to stick with the site/URL and just
| allow timeouts to handle "no response" type situations. In many ways this
| ias analogous to the use of multiple MX records in the domain name service.

What you could do is ping one or more of the IP addresses associated
with the domain name component (if present) of each URL and maybe
choose the one with the shortest round trip time ?

But ... rather than putting all the URLs in a single HREF, why not
have multiple HREFs in the A tag ? (or HREF1, HREF2, HREF3, ...)

Cheerio,

Martin