pro/cons of virtual hosting services

At 18:25 14/11/95, poole at eunet.ch wrote:
>>   > Naturally the correct solution would be for the HTTP protocol to pass
>>   > the complete URL to the server, however it's too late for that.
>>
>> Which I understand is fixed in the newest spec.

As far as I know, it is not in HTTP/1.0 (which is the formalization of
current practice), neither in HTTP/1.1 (which is what the WG is working
on). It should be in 1.2. Maybe it has been bumped to 1.1, which would be
good news.

>The problem is that I don't believe anybody that is -serious- about his
>server advertizing (for lots of money) http://www.xyz.com/  if it is
>not going to work with a -very- high percentage of browsers.

The problem is that we need a transition period, in which we can continue
to do virtual hosting, but have new browsers (and new versions of existing
browsers) sending the new header anyway, even if it's not used by servers.
When we reach a point where we have enough HTTP/1.whatever-compliant
browsers, we can stop using virtual hosting.

But for this to work, we have to start this transition period as soon as
possible. Given the growth of the Internet user base at the moment, I guess
that 80 or 90% of the users a year from now will be new users using new
browsers, and most of the rest will have switched. But if we start doing
this once the user base stops expanding that fast, it'll be A LOT harder.

Jacques.

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