RFC 1728 (rfc1728) - Page 1 of 6
Resource Transponders
Alternative Format: Original Text Document
Network Working Group C. Weider
Request for Comments: 1728 Bunyip Information Systems
Category: Informational December 1994
Resource Transponders
Status of this Memo
This memo provides information for the Internet community. This memo
does not specify an Internet standard of any kind. Distribution of
this memo is unlimited.
Abstract
Although a number of systems have been created in the last several
years to provide resource location and navigation on the Internet,
the information contained in these systems must be maintained and
updated by hand. This paper describes an automatic mechanism, the
resource transponder, for maintaining resource location information.
Author's Note:
This document is being circulated as sort of a research paper;
consequently there are no protocol specifications or anything of the
sort. I hope that we can go from here and actually design them if
there's consensus that they are potentially useful. Once we have some
idea of the required functionality, we can then go out and
standardize them.
Disclaimer
This paper represents only the opinions of the author; it does not
represent the consensus of the IIIR Working Group, although it is
recognized by them as one legitimate approach to a solution of the
problem.
1. Introduction
In the past few years, we've seen the invention and growth of a
number of information location systems on the Internet, e.g., archie,
Gopher, and WAIS. However, as these systems have become widely
deployed, a number of maintenance and security problems have arisen
with them. Some of the major ones:
1) Out of necessity, most of these systems contain pointers to the
desired resources rather than the resources themselves. Therefore,
if a resource becomes obsolete, is modified, or is moved, the
Weider