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Re: [xanadu] Proposed naming of addresses solution



Oh, I forgot to mention another aspect of this. A URL references a path to a file on a particular machine; if the file is moved, or the machine in question is renamed or taken out of service and not replaced by a server aliased to the same name, the link gets broken.

In Xanadu, the addresses refer to the *source* *documents*, not to the machine they are on or their relative position in a hierarchy; the document can be moved to a different location, or copied (permanently, for a mirror, or temporarily, for a cache) and the address would still point to the document. The process of copying the data automatically causes address resolution to 'point' to the correct location, and if there are several copies of the data, the caching/routing mechanism is supposed to retrieve it from the most readily accessible copy (or in the case of a very large dataset, from several sources fractionally, in a manner similar to p2p software such as BitTorrent - actually, this would be the more common case, as most 'documents' would be assembled from multiple fragments anyway rather than from a single hunk or 'file').

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