bear wrote:

> I think that would imply excessive reliance on a single
> site and server. And this is sometimes a problem.  Aside
> from the situation becoming such that the entire community
> would be hosed if a single server should go down, it would
> impose a significant burden (and bandwidth costs) on the
> maintainers of that site.

The point is not that it's a particular server.  It's that there's a
naming structure that _might_ be backed by a server.  Right now it's
just a name, and that's all it needs to be.  You can use it as a key
into a local table, if that's what you like.  Later, there might be a
server, if that's useful and there's interest.  A URI doesn't have to be
dereferenceable to be useful.

But even if you want a server behind the URI, there are all kinds of
techniques for spreading the load out.  Multi-hosting comes to mind, and
has been successfully used by a number of free-software projects.  So I
don't buy the "excessive reliance" argument.

> Are you prepared to run the server and do the indexing and
> the archiving and mirroring and suck up the bandwidth costs?

Hmm... that's very nearly an ad hominem attack.  I'm not interested in
fighting -- I thought we were having a useful technical discussion.

Peace,
Chris