The Gopher protocol provides a scheme for identifying a redundant
service for a given document. Believe it or not, this is in the
original Gopher spec -- the "+" data type (not to be confused with
Gopher+). If an item has a plus type, then it's a redundant
location for the previous document.
This seems straightforward and very useful. To my knowledge, it's
never been implemented. Is there any chance that the Web community
could define a similarly straightforward scheme, and actually get it
implemented?
The particular inspiration for this is that lately we've had a lot
of trouble connecting to the home page at CERN. A few weeks ago
there was an all-day outage of NCSA due to power failure. Mirroring
of key sites would be very useful not just in terms of outages, but
also in the interest of load-balancing.
/Rich Wiggins, CWIS Coordinator, Michigan State U