Re: mountable face servers?

Ivan Judson (judson@mcs.anl.gov)
Fri, 9 Dec 1994 08:22:58 -0600

At 12:45 PM 12/9/94 +0100, Axel Belinfante wrote:
>It is probably most horrible, but what about the following...
>Make a faces db accessable via a WWW (http) server, preferably
>you send it the email address, and it returns the bitmap (pixmap?).
>It probably keeps a cache with mappings email-address-to-facefile.
>Write a small client program that is given an email address and returns a
>face. It keeps its own cache, and only requests faces from the remote faces
>server if they are not yet in its own cache (or it uses the HEAD request?).
>Or you maybe could put a HTTP caching server (proxy?) in between.
>
>Why use http? Because it exists, and as a spin-off, it would make it easy
>to use faces in arbitrary pages.
>
>A similar chaching client scheme is used by someone who uses my Say...
>'page' as a remote text-to-speech translater, and it seems to work.

The same could be said of having a single faces distribution live in
'AFS-space'. I might install one there today, who knows. This might not
solve the general case, but as time goes on I bet it solves more and more of
the problem.

--Ivan