Hi Tony,
Tony Rolfe wrote the following about [netconnect] Voyager idea:
> I gather that, on the internet, there are sites called DNS Servers (or
> similar) which translate the www.fred.com URL's to their numeric
> equivalents.
Exactly right. Every server on the Internet has a 32-bit address,
arranged in 4 8-bit numbers from 0-255. An IP address looks like:
135.209.21.15 The DNS server resolves any given hostname into a
single IP address. eg. Typing http://www.microsoft.com and
http://207.46.130.45 will do exactly the same thing.
> It occurred to me that these must have a list of all URL's. Would
> it be possible for a voyager to have a function which would
> interrogate the DSN Server and return a list of all URL's which match
> a wild-card string?
DNS servers don't support wild-cards per se. This would not be an
overriding problem, except for the mathematics of this kind of
search...
> Quite often I know roughly what a URL should be, but close doesn't
> count. It would be good to be able to enter the string www.some*
> into the URL box and get a pop-up menu with the answers. Of course
> there would have to be a match limit or www.* might be a little bit
> slow.
DNS servers are moderately slow, by which I mean a request will take
from 300ms to 5 or 10s (sometimes more) So if you were looking for
www.somex.com and entered www.some*.com, it would take a minimum of 6
seconds for the 20 searches. Now, if you're looking for
www.somewy.com, it's going to take about 30 times longer, allowing for
digits, underscore etc. That's 3 minutes just to get everything from
www.somea.com to www.somezz.com. Looking for www.someway.com would
take in the region of 2 hours. By the time you get to
www.something.com, you're happily talking about 60 days.
It really would only make sense if you new the whole URL, including
suffix, and apart from 2 characters. eg. www.some??.com. Even then
it could be 5 minutes to get the results :(
The latest Internet Explorer will do a suffix search, if you 'miss',
so typing www.amiga would try www.amiga.com, www.amiga.net, www.
amiga.co.uk etc. until it gets a valid domain. But this only involves
searching about 16 suffixes.
Totty <8^)
--
Totty has an Amiga A1200, with 68060/50 and 603e/200 PPC.
32Mb RAM. 8x ATAPI CD. 1.7Gb HD. ShapeShifter V3.10 + OS 7.5.5
_____________________________________________________________
NetConnect mailing list. To unsubscribe, send an 'unsubcribe'
message to <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
