[7263] in www-talk@info.cern.ch
Re: Web server name?
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Marc VanHeyningen)
Sat Jan 21 01:02:36 1995
Date: Sat, 21 Jan 1995 06:09:37 +0100
Errors-To: listmaster@www0.cern.ch
Reply-To: mvanheyn@cs.indiana.edu
From: Marc VanHeyningen <mvanheyn@cs.indiana.edu>
To: Multiple recipients of list <www-talk@www0.cern.ch>
> When our search engine displays results lists from Web documents, we need
> to display the source of the documents in the list. Right now, all we can
> offer is the name of the host, which may or may not be meaningful... and
> usually rather ugly.
>
> Thus, it's occurred to us that we'd like to see a way to ask a server
> "What's your name?" and get back something like "Verity Corporate
> Information."
I think the appropriate way to indicate information about a site is with
the SITEINFO template from the IAFA/IIIR template set, at least as a starting
point. This should be a general approach to providing site-level information
(things like access policies, administrative contacts, physical location,
etc.) about servers. All we need is a conventional path, a la robots.txt,
where it should be looked for.
It's important to keep this general. For instance, an oft-mentioned dream is
for a WWW client to show a spinning globe with a blinking dot indicating
the location from which data is currently being fetched. SITEINFO can
include lat-long info, making this possible.
This template is discussed in draft-ietf-iiir-publishing-02. An
example is given at <URL:http://www.cs.indiana.edu/siteinfo.it> for
our site.
Some sites that are in ALIWEB already have such a template, along with a
bunch of other stuff, in a file usually named site.idx. I'd rather define
a separate location for just site-specific stuff, though; siteinfo.it seems
as good a name as any to me.
- Marc
