Re: ::scr removing the wuh-wuh-wuh

[Ben Evans <ben.evans@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

On Mon, May 20, 2002 at 11:42:40AM +0100, Simon Wistow wrote:
> 
> Are we just stuck in the past? I remember my dad asking why he just
> can't type in 'BMW' in the location bar of his browser and it wouldn't
> just work [0] and I told him that is was because it wasn't scalable. But
> 90% (he says, pulling figures out of his arse) of sites are .coms anyway
> so the root server has to cope with that and Realnames showed that it
> was technically possible until they got shafted.

Never forget that the protocol specifier is an important part of a
URL. To see this, note that the URI specification fails to make:

//www.foo.com/bar/index.htm a valid URL
 
What it perhaps *should* do is interpret it as a request for URI 
/bar/index.htm on machine www.foo.com, using whatever protocol was
used to retrieve the indicating document. (Ie, carry on using
whichever protocol we're currently using). IE does this. Mozilla and
Netscape fall back to their default protocol.

Their default protocol happens to be FTP.

> Should we just give in and get rid of the 'old' system? [1]

No. We need the old system, because it's the right way to solve a
problem. We want a late, lazy system of binding global names
(references) to resources. We have one, which demonstrably degrades at
least acceptably over the sort of high-entropy, variable bandwidth
networks we're currently using. 

The only other global names scheme we have that could even plausibly
handle the Real State of the Internet is X509, IMHO. And X509 is
shit, being insufficiently late, insufficiently lazy, inflexible and
too centralised.

> [0] There's an anecdote in one of the books I've just read where a user
> always goes to yahoo (which is her homepage) and types in the name of
> the site she wants to go to (with full www.foo.com syntax IIRC) instead
> of typing it into location bar. 

~20% of requests in search engines are for an exact URL as
above. IIRC, it's slightly higher for yahoo and slightly lower for
google. 
 
It should also be remembered than many Ordinary Users (tm) browse
with the URL bar hidden. Quite a few know not of its existence, never
mind what it is, and how it works.

Ben