Re: [xanadu] Proposed naming of addresses solution

["First Speaker Schol-R-LEA;2" <scholr1@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

Oh, I forgot to mention another aspect of this. A URL references a path 
to a file on a particular machine; if the file is moved, or the machine 
in question is renamed or taken out of service and not replaced by a 
server aliased to the same name, the link gets broken.

In Xanadu, the addresses refer to the *source* *documents*, not to the 
machine they are on or their relative position in a hierarchy; the 
document can be moved to a different location, or copied (permanently, 
for a mirror, or temporarily, for a cache) and the address would still 
point to the document. The process of copying the data automatically 
causes address resolution to 'point' to the correct location, and if 
there are several copies of the data, the caching/routing mechanism is 
supposed to retrieve it from the most readily accessible copy (or in the 
case of a very large dataset, from several sources fractionally, in a 
manner similar to p2p software such as BitTorrent - actually, this would 
be the more common case, as most 'documents' would be assembled from 
multiple fragments anyway rather than from a single hunk or 'file').

--
Schol-R-LEA;2, LCF ELF BiWM MGT POEE JAM GS SMOF KCO KoR TGIF
First Speaker, Last Eristic Church of Finagle and Holy Bisexuality
Episkopos of the Dr Benway Lives for Your Sins Cabal
"The Opposition is the keystone of the Establishment."