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"How to make the World Wide Web safe for the Internet" is a reference to the principal goal behind RCDS. I was first exposed to the Web in November 1991, at the Santa Fe IETF conference. Tim Berners-Lee was showing off his browser to a small group of people. It was the first Internet-based application we'd seen that could deal with multifont text (no images yet), and was obviously very attractive. "How do you solve the problem where the file you want is halfway across the world?" I asked. "I don't," he said. Iknew then that we were soon going to have a big problem on our hands.
At that time the notion of conservation of bandwidth was a big part of Internet culture. It was considered abusive of the network to ftp a file from across the ocean unless you first tried to find a closer copy. You had an idea where the ftp server was because you typed in the domain name yourself. Hiding such details from the user made the web easier to use in general, but made it more difficult (relatively speaking) to use mirror sites.
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