The Resource Locator Service: Fixing a Flaw in the Web |
The architecture of the World Wide Web has scaled beyond its original expectations, but problems are now emerging that could undermine its effectiveness as an information system, and restrict its future growth. Nearly 30% of all web pages experience link rot, DNS domain names are rapidly running out, and older web pages are deleted without being archived, leading to the loss of potentially important information. These problems are caused by the URL and its reliance on the Internet?s DNS for its namespace, which we argue represent a serious flaw in the web?s architecture. In this paper, we present a new web-specific name resolution service that has been designed to address these problems. Called the Resource Locator Service, it offers an unconstrained namespace, and a mechanism for transparent resource migration that can dynamically locate static resources across time and space.
Evans MP, Furnell SM