Subject: Mapping names in the server
From: timbl (Tim Berners-Lee)
To: [email-masked] (Jean-Francois Groff)
Cc: [email-masked]
Date: Tue, 24 Mar 92 11:23:31 GMT+0100

Ed,

As JF says, you can  map logical document names to real file names in the server by  
means of the rule file. We didn't put the rule file into the client,
because we didn't want the start-up time to be long. Also,
we wanted a W3 document name to be followable by anyone, not just
the few who have picked up the latest gems of rule file titbits.

(There were a couple of starts missing from JF's example, which should have been

	map	rfc:*	file://ftp.nisc.sri.com/rfc/*

)

Actually the current distributed server expects the output of the rule file
to be a local filename. You would have to modify it to expect a w3 address.

In the long term, a name service should exist to translate

	name-service:/org/isoc/rfc/959

into say file://ftp.nisc.sri.com/rfc/rfc959.ps and .txt.  As noone seems to
want to extend the DNS, it looks as though x500 is the best bet. There was
some discussion on this at the IETF, though it'll be a while before x500 is all  
over.

Tim