What's bothering me is that many of the pointers refer to highly popular
archive sites, such as oak.oakland.edu for DOS stuff or sumex-aim for Mac.
My existing text explains about using mirror sites, so when I say "file
msdos/foo/bar.zip at a SimTel site", I hope that the reader is primed to
go look in his or her nearest mirror archive.
I fear that a ready-to-click link pointing to oak.oakland.edu will cause
people to just click without thinking, and thereby increase the load on
the central archive sites. Or more likely, increase the amount of mail
I get saying "I couldn't get into site foo.bar, is it closed down?".
I suppose I could make the links point to some randomly chosen mirror
site, but that just moves the problem. Worse, it makes it harder for
people to recognize that I am talking about an entry in one of these
well-known collections; they are much more likely to think that they
*must* go to the named site. Clueful Macintosh users, for example,
will immediately recognize sumex-aim.stanford.edu:/info-mac/foo/bar,
and will probably have no trouble remembering their local Info-Mac
mirror site name. They are less likely to make the same substitution
if I name an unfamiliar mirror site.
So, is there any solution that is both convenient for WWW users and
considerate of limited net resources? Should I leave my text as is,
instead of making it WWW-ready?
regards, tom lane
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