Identity

[Ketil Z Malde]

"Hunter, David" <dhunter at mobility.com> writes:

> But my questions remain: Is there ever a time when we need/want an
> application to know or think that foo.com is the same as bar.com?

If you're talking about DNS, I would think it could be interesting if
you are doing reverse lookups.

If you're using it as part of an URL, and bar.com is much closer to me 
than foo.com, but foo.com gets updated more often, I might want to
know whether the URLs refer to the same object.

Add a new HTTP request or something that gives you an md5 of the
object.  Embed this in an attribute in links if you want to make sure
you refer to the correct object.  And there is of course no reason for 
a search engine not to incorporate checksums already.

[...]
> I have a feeling it's going to be application-specific,

The DNS entries for foo.com and bar.com could easily refer to the same 
IP address, but have different MX records - or if you prefer, the
document at http://foo.com could be different from that at
http://bar.com 

-kzm
-- 
If I haven't seen further, it is by standing in the footprints of giants

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