Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!cs.utexas.edu!swrinde!ucsd!ucbvax!BBN.COM!haverty
From: haverty@BBN.COM (Jack Haverty)
Newsgroups: comp.protocols.tcp-ip
Subject: Re:  About RFCs in Postscript and Ascii
Message-ID: <9002161046.AA11546@ucbvax.Berkeley.EDU>
Date: 13 Feb 90 15:33:03 GMT
References: <465@nrcvax.NRC.COM>
Sender: usenet@ucbvax.BERKELEY.EDU
Organization: The Internet
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Re: Postscript/ascii RFCs

Sorry for the gap in this "conversation" - I spent a week at COMNET
electronically incommunicado in a sea of products from the
communications industry!

Vint clarified the intent of the policy for me - to provide machine-processable
versions of all RFCs for ease of searching, etc.  I fully support that notion;
after all, we're supposed to be applying computers and communications to 
getting work done in a better way than manual brute-force techniques.

At the risk of opening yet another round.....

Speaking of brute force, perhaps interesting documents on the Internet
should be made available in SEARCHABLE format, as the next obvious step
beyond ascii and FTP.  By this I mean supplementing the "file servers"
which are sprinkled throughout the system with database servers in which
the documents are stored, and which could be queried through some kind
of language (SQL, grep, whatever). Rather than forcing everyone to FTP
all of the files to all of their local computers, and search them there,
we could allow people to send queries to the server machine(s) to find
the identity of relevant documents which could then be transferred.

This idea is of course hardly new - the "DataComputer" on the Arpanet in
1975 or so provided such a capability, and services such as IQUEST accessible
through networks such as CompuServe provide similar capabilities for the more
formal publications.

Perhaps such a capability should now be on the Internet?  Is anyone thinking or
working on this?  Maybe it already exists and I'm just not aware of it?

Jack