Re: ARIN Policy on IP-based Web Hosting

[Jeff Mcadams <jeffm () iglou com>]

Also sprach Andrew Brown
> http is a good idea, but...

> "mime typing"?  i don't want a program that's gonna tell me what i have
> to do with my data, or with whihc program i will have to open it later.

Where on earth did you get the idea that mime typing requires all that?
The mime type is just one side telling the other side what it thinks is
in the file (and giving some other nice little benefits like encoding
transformations and stuff).  What you do with the file once you get it
doesn't have anything to do with the mime type unless *you* configure
your program to pay attention to the mime type and do something with it.
If you want to tell your program to open a postscript file in RealMedia
Player...so be it, you can do that...not to much effect I wouldn't
think, but that's totally up to you to do it.  If you want to set your
program so every mime type just dumps out to a file, you can do that
too.

> my data belongs in a file, exactly as i requested it.  with the
> appropriate line-termination, of course, which http doesn't do.

Again, conversion of line termination is controlled by the end system,
not the protocol itself.  FTP happens to have defined in the RFCs how it
should be handled...there's no reason you can't do the same process with
http-received files.

> ""human-beneficial markup"?  you just said we need a "machine-parsable
> file indexing method".  what do we need humans for?

Because, while I sometimes write programs/scripts that go out and parse
directories and get the files I want, I *very* often manually go in and
get individual files that I desire...any setup like this needs to
support both.

> caching usually gets in the way.

Only if done wrong (which, regrettably, is most of the time from what
I've seen)
-- 
Jeff McAdams                            Email: jeffm () iglou com
Head Network Administrator              Voice: (502) 966-3848
IgLou Internet Services                        (800) 436-4456