Re: [hybi] Last Call: <draft-ietf-hybi-thewebsocketprotocol-10.txt> (The WebSocket protocol) to Proposed Standard

[Keith Moore <[e-mail]>]

On Jul 24, 2011, at 11:21 PM, Mark Andrews wrote:

>>> How do you solve the problem of hosting just "http://example.com/"
>>> on "s1.joes-web-service.com" and not redirect everything else at
>>> example.com?  People have been complaining about this for about as
>>> long as the web has existed.
>> 
>> Well, in a way, that's what NAPTR was for.  All of the UR
>> i resolution mechanisms (equally applicable to DNS-based URIs) that were =
>> developed and never really used grew out of the original realization in =
>> the early 1990s that CERN could stop hosting the original web pages if =
>> it wanted to, and there was no way to keep those links from going stale.
> 
> NAPTR is not defined for HTTP.
> SRV is not defined for HTTP.
> 
>> The problem never went away, but the DNS-based solutions were defined a =
>> long time ago and never used.
> 
> No.  It was explitly NOT defined.

Ok, fair enough.   Those of us who were working on the DNS-based URI resolution mechanisms realized that they could be applied to http URIs in addition to almost anything else (NAPTR is incredibly flexible if you don't mind doing lots of DNS lookups).  But they were never formally adopted.

But if you really want to use DNS to do redirects for http: URIs (or for that matter ws: URIs or almost any other kind of URI), NAPTR was tailor-made to do that.  SRV was not.

Keith