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Re: URIs harmful (was RE: Article: Keeping pa ce w

• To: Miles Sabin <miles@m...>
• Subject: Re: URIs harmful (was RE: Article: Keeping pa ce with James Clark)
• From: Mike Moran <mmoran@n...>
• Date: Mon, 22 Jul 2002 14:42:17 +0100
• Cc: xml-dev@l...
• References: <2C61CCE8A870D211A523080009B94E430752B6CA@HQ5> <200207221429.44577.miles@m...>
• User-agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.0; en-US; rv:1.0rc2) Gecko/20020510

Miles Sabin wrote:
> Bullard, Claude L (Len) wrote,
> 
>>All the "always resolves" means is that if the http: endowed URI is
>>handed to a resolver, it will resolve.  What gets returned may be
>>caca, but it will resolve.
> 
> 
> What? Even http://this.host.does.not.exist/ ?
> 
> You won't even get a 404 from that. Do you count TCP-level failures as 
> "resolving"?

The thing is, unless you have knowledge embedded in the client of the 
resolver there is no way to tell if a TCP or DNS level failure is 
transient or final, without multiple retries. Even then, it may not be 
correct.

For instance, http://www.foo.com/ may not resolve because my DNS server 
is unreachable or because the DNS server hasn't been configured 
properly. Now, that's fine if I know that "www.foo.com" or "foo.com", or 
".com" `should' exist. However, if I don't have such a priori 
information, I can't tell the difference between http://www.foo.com/ and 
http://www.foo.blah/ when they produce the same error.

--
Mike

• References:
  • RE: URIs harmful (was RE: Article: Keeping pa ce with James Clark)
    • From: "Bullard, Claude L (Len)" <clbullar@i...>
  • Re: URIs harmful (was RE: Article: Keeping pa ce with James Clark)
    • From: Miles Sabin <miles@m...>

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