RFC: proxy conventions

I perceive need for a convention around proxies (more than just SOCKS,
especially for those clients that don't speak SOCKS), and preferably in a way
that appears transparent to limited or historical clients (like Squid's gopher
support, the server would do the work of translation). This means having to
embed the hostname in the selector the client sends, e.g., the client requests
from proxy.host the selector

@gopher.floodgap.com/

which would respond with Floodgap's main menu, but parsed so that the proxy is
the server name, and selectors have the host prepended, e.g.,

1Example<TAB>@gopher.floodgap.com/example<TAB>proxy.host<TAB>70

The client then requests

@gopher.floodgap.com/example

from proxy.host, and so forth. I am not aware of selectors starting with a bare
'@', though those are potentially legal (they'd have to be so that a client
that's too smart for this idea doesn't reject the selector as bogus), so it's
worth talking about.

Open to comments. I haven't implemented this yet.

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  Cameron Kaiser * Floodgap Systems * www.floodgap.com * ckaiser-nb4sah8SP49Wk0Htik3J/[email protected]
-- To be, or not to be -- that always confused me ... -- "In Living Color" ----