Re: associating constant feature sets with URLs

Some questions and comments:

- Do you have any specific application in mind which needs such a
delegation mechanism soon?  I don't think this group should develop a
standard for delegation unless there is some `market demand' for it.

- The general idea of defining the semantics by `substitute the text
found at <URL> here' seems sound to me.

- The specification should not get into details about how the
recipient of the filter string with the <URL> goes about obtaining the
<URL> contents.  Just specify that the details of the retrieval
process (timeouts, use of proxies, caching, quality of service used,
etc) are entirely up to the recipient.

- If the server of the <URL> is down then one could recover by having
the sender of the filter string expand the <URL>s.  Do you mean for
this type of recovery to be a standard feature of your mechanism?  If
so it is probably best provided for by requiring that the protocol
between the sender and recipient has a feature which allows the
recipient to ask the sender for an expansion.  (For example, if the
HTTP protocol is used between the sender and the receiver, then the
mechanism could be an error code which causes the sender to retry the
request with all <URL>s expanded.)


Koen.