Re: sd access through a WWW server

William C Fenner (fenner@cmf.nrl.navy.mil)
Sat, 15 Jan 1994 01:51:43 -0500


[For those on the www-talk mailing list: the idea is to have the ability to
use WWW for a session directory for multicast conferences. Many multicast
conferences have a limited lifetime, so the use of a less dynamic system
such as WWW may not be preferable.]

On Fri, 14 Jan 94 16:30:56 PST Yee-Hsiang Chang wrote:
> If a wide-area directory service such as
> the Mosaic can be tailored for the conference announcement and discovery,
> we do not need to send event message periodically.

One of the other ideas that I've been tossing around is to create an
application/x-sd type in HTTP, which simply passes the sd entry to a
program that does whatever sd would do with that entry - then people
running Mosaic with a proper ~/.mailcap could actually launch multicast
applications by clicking on a hypertext link.

I prefer application/x-sd to application/x-csh because it allows
the client to decide what application to run for each session type,
instead of forcing the server to make assumptions.

If there is interest for this as well, I might crank it up a couple of
notches on my priority list.

Bill