Re: WWWlogical idea

Brian Behlendorf (brian@wired.com)
Fri, 9 Dec 1994 19:58:36 -0800 (PST)


On Thu, 8 Dec 1994, James C Deikun wrote:
> On Tue, 6 Dec 1994, Mark Waks wrote:
> > For a possible alternative, consider one thought that I've been
> > playing with for some time (I proposed it here a long time ago) --
> > keyword-selected objects. In this scheme, you can provide keywords as
> > an alternative to the URL for an object; if the local system has an
> > object that fits those keywords, then it just uses that instead of
> > loading the URL across the Net. As a possible refinement, you can
> > define "mandatory" keywords (which a prospective object must match)
> > and "optional" keywords (which may be matched or not, at the discretion
> > of the browser).
>
> I think this would probably be a job for a type of URN; then all the web
> formats could use it, not just VRML.

URN's aren't ideal - maybe we can define standard fields for URC's, but
URN's are more designed to work like this:

URN:URC::DNS-hostname:host IP number:

I.e. you give a resource a URN, and then you can change its physical
location without breaking links to it.

URN's could have keywords as part of the name, but it isn't as flexible
as what Mark (and others out here :) want. Now, Universal Resource
Containers describe meta-information about objects, and (in the proposal)
will be resolved and cached around the net much like DNS is now (they
also provide the URN->URL resolution). Having some standard vrml-related
metainformation fields (like keywords) in there might not be a bad idea.
This is how local caching should work, and is one solution to the
bandwidth problem.

Brian

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