Untangling the Web from DNS

The Web relies on the Domain Name System (DNS) to resolve the hostname portion of URLs into IP addresses. This marriage-of-convenience enabled the Web's meteoric rise, but the resulting entanglement is now hindering both infrastructures--the Web is overly constrained by the limitations of DNS, and DNS is unduly burdened by the demands of the Web. There has been much commentary on this sad state-of-affairs, but dissolving the illfated union between DNS and the Web requires a new way to resolve Web references. To this end, this paper describes the design and implementation of Semantic Free Referencing (SFR), a reference resolution infrastructure based on distributed hash tables (DHTs).

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2004
• Where: NSDI
• Authors: Michael Walfish, Hari Balakrishnan
• Keywords: Computer Networks, Domain Name System, Hostname Portion, NSDI 2004, Web's Meteoric Rise