RE: Internet Books

John Curran (jcurran@nic.near.net)
Fri, 30 Dec 1994 19:30:19 -0800

At 11:44 AM 12/24/94, KLOPFENSTEIN@opie.bgsu.edu wrote:
>I'm wondering about the wisdom of all these books including URLs in
>them. An interesting study would be one that examined the lifetime of
>the URL. I am not entused about books that rely on URL after URL. I
>have seen many published in Internet World magazine that are not
>functioning by the time that monthly magazine comes out. I guess I also
>see a book or URLs as being a relatively easy sell. Am I too cyncical?

No. People treat URL's as if they were permanent, when they're actually
highly suspectible to change. Ask anyone who's moved from a shared WWW
server to a dedicated system: it can be extremely difficult to maintain
URL continuity throughout.

Someday, we just might have some other uniform resource identifiers which
is defined to be "persistent" and a mechanism for convenient mapping to
a list of current URL's. This would allow authors to reference the "name"
of a new resources or service and know that the name would almost always
remain stable even if the current location (i.e. the current list of URL's)
changes. People are doing similiar things with domain names right now, but
that solution has some problems scaling with the Internet growth rate.

/John