Web/E-business /

User-friendly alternative to URLs due soon

By Carolyn Duffy Marsan
Network World, 09/04/00

The Internet engineering community is putting the final touches on a technology that could replace URLs by allowing end users to access Web sites, search for information and send e-mail using easy-to-remember names instead of complicated strings of characters, dashes and dots.

The Common Names Resolution Protocol (CNRP) was developed by engineers from Network Solutions, RealNames, Netword and AT&T. Today, Network Solutions is releasing a beta version of its CNRP software for Internet users to try. RealNames and Netword will roll out commercial versions of CNRP later this fall.

Network managers can tap CNRP to improve the usability of their intranet and Web sites. With CNRP, corporate end users can access information about their 401(k) plans by typing "401K'' into the address line on their browsers. They can send e-mail to coworkers by entering the recipients' first and last names. On e-commerce Web sites, customers can locate products by their names.

CNRP would provide "much better navigation for a Web site,'' says Raj Pareek, manager of e-government services for the city of Boston. Pareek's team develops content for Boston's Web site, which boasts 12,000 Web pages and 95,000 users per month, as well as an intranet used by city government employees.

"People call us and say: 'Where is a Web page located?' And we have to tell them a long name with backslashes and forward slashes,'' Pareek says. "It would be nice to have a very easy way to name and reach that location.''

A friend to wireless

Because it supports pithy names and phrases, CNRP may be useful in wireless applications "to accommodate for handhelds' small screens" and limited keyboards. For example, a CNRP service could let Palm device users check stock prices by entering a company name rather than an obscure stock listing.

"Domain names and URLs are not that human-friendly. They're unique, and they require a certain syntax. We don't talk to people in dots and dashes and colons,'' explains Michael Mealling, a research manager at Network Solutions and a CNRP developer. "CNRP could be used for the next-generation naming services, to make the Internet naming system much more natural.''

CNRP lets client applications such as Web browsers communicate with common name resolution services hosted on servers connected to the Internet or private networks running Internet protocols. The services would match a company or document name to the corresponding URL and serve that URL back to the end user.

In corporate environments, network managers can create CNRP services for accessing information about employees and customers or for sharing corporate documents.

"CNRP would help enterprises immensely by giving access to corporate resources using standard words and phrases rather than the often excruciatingly complex URLs,'' says Marshall Mosely, vice president of product management at Netword and a CNRP developer.

On the Internet, end users could create common names much as they do bookmarks. Individuals and organizations could register common names for themselves along with details about their locations or businesses so they could be easily found should multiple people register the same common name.

"The promise of CNRP is that it will foster the development of new services,'' says Nicholas Popp, chief technical officer at RealNames and a developer of CNRP. "There will be easier-to-navigate, easier-to-search vertical databases coming out for books or movies or [music files.] You'll be able to put in your favorite song title and find it on the Web.''

Specification coming

After a year of work, CNRP developers will publish a final version of the protocol specification this month. The leadership of the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) is expected to approve CNRP as a standards-track protocol this fall. Then CNRP will be stable enough for developers to begin creating applications that support the protocol.

The one remaining technical challenge for CNRP is dealing with internationalized domain names, says Leslie Daigle, who chairs the IETF working group on CNRP. She says the group plans to use a standard character-encoding scheme that supports most languages.

Hitting the market

Meanwhile, CNRP-based services are starting to hit the market.

Network Solutions is providing a free, downloadable CNRP browser plug-in for Microsoft's Internet Explorer. The plug-in lets users register common names into a database for future access. Network Solutions is working on a similar plug-in for Netscape's Mozilla browser, Mealling says.

Mealling anticipates this CNRP pilot project will run for about six months.

"We're doing this as a learning experience,'' Mealling says. "We're making it available to the public so we can learn enough about it to decide what we want to do to productize it.''

RealNames will support CNRP in its Internet keyword service starting in October. With the RealNames service, Internet keywords start at $100 per year for 1,000 keyword-driven visits. Higher-volume corporate offerings also are available.

CNRP will eventually replace the proprietary protocol that underlies the RealNames service, but the transition will take time because it requires upgrading search engines such as MSN, about.com and AltaVista.

Netword will support CNRP in its Internet keyword service by year-end. The Netword service, which powers URL lookups for Internet telephony provider Net2Phone, runs on a proprietary protocol that will be augmented with CNRP.

Registered Networds cost $30 per year for 1,000 resolved requests per month, with extra requests costing 3 cents each. Volume discounts are available for large numbers of Networds or high-volume requests. End users can create personal Networds for free, the company says.

"CNRP codifies and standardizes the type of service we offer,'' says Shep Bostin, chief operating officer at Netword. Widespread availability of CNRP will mean "a greater number of users can take advantage of our service.''

Two vendors that haven't committed to CNRP are Microsoft and Netscape. Engineers from both companies participated in the IETF's CNRP development effort, but have not announced plans to incorporate the technology into their browsers.

"One of our hopes with our pilot project is for somebody at Microsoft to see our CNRP plug-in and want to integrate it into'' an upcoming version of Internet Explorer, Mealling says.

Common names may alleviate some of the legal problems associated with domain names, such as cybersquatting and trademark disputes. While only one person can own a particular domain name and its corresponding URL, several people can register the same common name along with parameters such as location to differentiate the sites. When an end user calls up a common name that is registered to several people, he would receive a dialog box listing the sites in his geographic area or communities of interest.