Re: draft-newton-link-rr (was Re: Last Call: <draft-faltstrom-uri-10.txt> (The Uniform Resource) Identifier (URI) DNS Resource Record) to Proposed Standard

[Nico Williams <[e-mail]>]

On Fri, Feb 27, 2015 at 09:45:10PM +0100, Patrik Fältström wrote:
> > On 27 feb 2015, at 21:37, Nico Williams <[e-mail]> wrote:
> > On Fri, Feb 27, 2015 at 08:07:25AM +0100, Patrik Fältström wrote:
> >> My feedback to Andrew when he presented this to me was that:
> >> 
> >> - In general I am nervous of moving HTTP header attributes into the
> >>  DNS, as it might create inconsistencies when for example the data in
> >>  DNS do not match what is in the HTTP header, and we already have a
> >>  content-negotiation mechanism in HTTP
> > 
> > If anything, it may not provide the optimization that's desired.  (Any
> > numbers?)
> 
> Ok, to go back in history, this is why I originally did believe more
> in Gopher than Web... :-)

But I wanted current numbers, as in performance numbers :)

> I though a proper negotiation would be to know already in the source
> of a referral what kind of data the target was. This was how Gopher
> worked, but Web was different. The link was (is) neutral and the
> negotiation happens at the target.

Very large references would have been unwieldy in HTML back then.

Content-addressed storage is still unwieldy for cross-domain
referencing, and always will be.

> That story, early 1990's, gave me the lesson that the "correct"
> solutions do not always win. The "best" solution wins.

That's hardly the only case, and I'm not sure that your approach would
have been more correct.  The more metadata [about a target resource] you
put into the referring entity's content, the better the chances of the
reference going stale.  Content-addressing is an extreme example of
this, though for your approach I guess one would have used some fuzzy
matching (which is not applicable to content-addressing).

> And this is the reason I am nervous over "gopher like features" in
> DNS. Even though I think it is good...I think it will loose...

I don't think that's a good enough reason here.  There may be other
reasons to tread carefully here.

Nico
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