Re: Suggestion: URL string-search syntax

Gavin Nicol (gtn@ebt.com)
Sun, 29 May 1994 16:18:00 +0500


Willem says:

>The URL,URI,URF,URN etc discussion is becoming extremely critical in my
>opinion, and its time there is some movement through IETF or other channels..

I must agree with you. This problem is hurting not only the WWW but also
CORBA and other groups. One bad thing about the WWW is that you cannot
do an equivalency test on documents/objects. All we have is "if they have
the same name, then they are the same". This leads to one shortcoming of
the WWW: that even if a document of the same content resides on a local
web server, if the URL' points to Botswana, that is where it will be
copied from. Without some for of equivalency test, doing anything about this
(like tracking documents/versions) is impossible. Perhaps we should try to
generate some suggestions for the IETF? I feel that this is a *hard* problem
though...

nick