Untangling the Web from DNS Michael Walfisha, Hari Balakrishnana, and Scott Shenkerb IRIS Project a{mwalfish, hari}@csail.mit.edu, MIT Computer Science and AI Laboratory (CSAIL), Cambridge, MA
[email protected], International Computer Science Institute (ICSI), Berkeley, CA Abstract tably in the URN literature [2, 5, 9, 19, 28, 29], to move the Web away from host-based URLs. The Web relies on the Domain Name System (DNS) to Since the Web has imposed the burden of branding on resolve the hostname portion of URLs into IP addresses. DNS, and DNS has restricted the flexibility of the Web, This marriage-of-convenience enabled the Web’s mete- we believe that both systems would benefit if they were oric rise, but the resulting entanglement is now hinder- disentangled from each other. However, dissolving this ing both infrastructures—the Web is overly constrained mutually unhealthy union would require a new RRS for by the limitations of DNS, and DNS is unduly burdened the Web. What should such an RRS look like? There by the demands of the Web. There has been much com- has been extensive discussion about this topic, largely mentary on this sad state-of-affairs, but dissolving the ill- within the URN community but among many others as fated union between DNS and the Web requires a new well. While we don’t provide a comprehensive review way to resolve Web references. To this end, this paper de- of the commentary, the literature suggests the following scribes the design and implementation of Semantic Free two basic requirements for any such RRS (both of which Referencing (SFR), a reference resolution infrastructure DNS-based URLs do not satisfy): based on distributed hash tables (DHTs).