Date: Wed, 27 Oct 93 14:22:04 -0700
From: marca@ncsa.uiuc.edu (Marc Andreessen)
Message-Id: <9310272122.AA00121@wintermute.ncsa.uiuc.edu>
To: mitra@path.net (Mitra)
Subject: Re: Thumbnail Sketch of the UR* Arena
In-Reply-To: <9310262317.aa04093@pandora.sf.ca.us>
<peterd@bunyip.com>
Mitra writes:
> Without type information, its not much good putting a URN in a pointer.
> Because unless something will tell me what type of object it is, then
> I dont know whether to pass it to "xv" or "less".
>
> Some protocols - e.g. Gopher, already pass the type information around,
> and they could start using URL's immediately, but others arent
> going to be able to handle URN's on their own.
Can we close this debate by simply having a MIME type field along with
each URL in the response from a URN lookup, but allowing it to be set
to "dynamic" for protocols like Gopher, WAIS, and HTTP/1.0 that do
their own, on-the-fly typing?
Marc