Re: DIENST, some comments

Carl Lagoze (lagoze@cs.cornell.edu)
Thu, 08 Sep 1994 11:54:48 -0400


In message <199409081056.AA070311795@freya.let.rug.nl>, bert@let.rug.nl writes:
>The Dienst draft specifies a much-needed protocol for efficient
>electronic publishing. People don't like to retrieve megabytes of
>Postscript only to discover that the text is of no use to them.
>Dienst's search and page-by-page facilities deserve to be implemented
>as soon as possible.
>

Some Text deleted.

>One of the "related issues" in section 5 seems to point to distributed
>servers ("Server registration"). Exactly how servers should relay
>queries to each other is unclear to me. This probably needs additional
>mechanisms, not present in the current Dienst protocol.

The current implementation incorporates a "first-cut" at a
meta-server protocol. A central site (Cornell, at this point)
maintains a registry of existing Dienst servers, other sites
periodically query this site to update their tables. The current
design is rather primitive but lays the basis for what we'd like to
do in the future.

>
>
>Regards,
>Bert
>
>
>PS. "Dienst" appears to stand for "Distributed Interactive Extensible
>Network Server for Techreports", but I wonder if it is a coincidence
>that "dienst" is the Dutch word for "service"?
>--

No coincidence, one of the implementers (Jim Davis) is married to a
Dutch woman.

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