In message <Pine.BSI.3.93.960721163003.15875B-100000@sidhe.memra.com>, Michael Dillon writes:
WWW servers can issue a "redirect" to a different URL.
I know that. As I said, I don't consider a different URL to be a good solution. It confuses users. It doesn't interoperate well with WWW-authentication (you have to auth to each differently named server... suppose your net connection fluctuates while you're surfing and you get bounced elsewhere). It pollutes search engines with many duplicate URLs -- which is confusing for users. (Yeah you could just special case a few big search engines and never redirect them... hack.) Perhaps the largest problem, which actually acts against what you're trying to solve by doing this, is that it doesn't operate well with client or proxy caches. Every time there's a net burp, the users caches are invalidated (because of a redirect) and they have to reload everything.
Life is never perfect. ;-)
Yep. Redirects are far from it. There are better solutions... and we'd be better off if one of them is standardized and we use it instead. Dean