one thing that I think is essential in any new content-distribution
work is to explicitly define roles and responsibilities - when an
intermediary is introduced between the content-provider and the
content-user, to which party is the intermediary responsible?
(the same device might be used in either case, but intermediaries
should be clear about whose instructions they are following)
under no circumstances should content be altered, nor should stale
content be delivered, except with explicit consent from at least one
of the end parties. for example, we don't want to standardize a
way to allow an ISP to alter or cache content except as intended
by one of the end parties.
finally, there need to be provisions for fault isolation and
diagnosis, which probably requires (among other things) the
ability to bypass intermediaries.
Keith
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : Thu Nov 18 2004 - 11:21:29 MST