WWW servers can issue a "redirect" to a different URL.
I know that. As I said, I don't consider a different URL to be a
good solution. It confuses users. It doesn't interoperate well with
WWW-authentication (you have to auth to each differently named server...
suppose your net connection fluctuates while you're surfing and you get
bounced elsewhere). It pollutes search engines with many duplicate URLs
-- which is confusing for users. (Yeah you could just special case a
few big search engines and never redirect them... hack.)
Perhaps the largest problem, which actually acts against what you're
trying to solve by doing this, is that it doesn't operate well with
client or proxy caches. Every time there's a net burp, the users
caches are invalidated (because of a redirect) and they have to reload
everything.
Life is never perfect. 
Yep. Redirects are far from it.
There are better solutions... and we'd be better off if one of them is
standardized and we use it instead.
Dean
WWW-authentication (you have to auth to each differently named server...
suppose your net connection fluctuates while you're surfing and you get
bounced elsewhere).
Route dampening...
>Life is never perfect.
There are better solutions... and we'd be better off if one of them is
standardized and we use it instead.
Is anything like this planned for HTTP 1.1? or 1.2?
It might be easier to get something like this into a standard if somebody
hacks up part of the solution and runs it for a while as I described
with redirects. Then the standards makers can say, "Hey here is a great
idea and we can solve all these problems with it by incorporating it into
HTTP 1.2".
Michael Dillon - ISP & Internet Consulting
Memra Software Inc. - Fax: +1-604-546-3049
http://www.memra.com - E-mail: michael@memra.com
Since I don't follow HTTP evolution, so I could be missing something, but for
distributed web service that is transparent to users, you'd need something
that keeps track of RTT at the client level that has some persistance.
-dorian
Nope. You only need the a form of redirect that is transparent to the
end user so their bookmark files etc... will always refer to the original
master controller site. And some similar mods to webcrawlers and caches.
The actual analysis of topology would be separate from serving up pages
and would likely use more than one technique depending on the situation.
Of course all this is hypothetical right now and would have minimal impact
on network operations except for XP operators who have to build out more
colo rack space....
Michael Dillon - ISP & Internet Consulting
Memra Software Inc. - Fax: +1-604-546-3049
http://www.memra.com - E-mail: michael@memra.com