Re: Maintaining HTTP connections...

Simon E Spero (ses@tipper.oit.unc.edu)
Wed, 27 Jul 94 21:06:40 -0400

Proxying is one way around the installed base; another cute hack is to use
a special magic prefix in an ordinary HTTP URL- for example, one could use
URLs of the form <http://foo.com/_fhttp/frotz.html>, as well as dedicated
urls like <fhttp://foo.com/frotz.html>.

Legacy browsers would connect to the http port and send the url as given;
fhttp aware browsers would try connecting to the fhttp port first. This
would give full backward compatibility, and would also give a strong incentive
for people to upgrade. If Super-Muzak from Muzak Communications
works ten times faster than Square-Muzak from Sprout, the folks at Sprout are
going to have a big incentive to get the faster protocol into their next
release...

Simon