Onion Networks — AKA, my pal and former OpenColan Justin Chapaweske — have released their “Content Addressable Web” white-paper, and it’s good reading. Essentially, the scheme involves extending HTTP headers so that servers (which may be peers in a P2P network, natch) can automatically tell browsers where other copies of a requested file live:

HTTP/1.1 200 OK
Content-Type: Application/octet-stream
Content-Length: 662072345
X-Content-URN: urn:sha1:RMUVHIRSGUU3VU7FJWRAKW3YWG2S2RFB
X-URI-RES: http://www.linuxmirrors.com/pub/Redhat-7.1i386-disc1.iso ; N2R
X-URI-RES: http://123.24.24.21:8080/uri-res/N2R?urn:sha1:JJbase32JJ; N2R
X-URI-RES: http://123.24.24.21:8080/uri-res/N2Ls?urn:sha1:JJbase32JJ; N2Ls

With this response, a CAW aware browser can immediately begin downloading the content from www.linuxiso.org, linuxmirrors.com, and 123.24.24.21 all in parallel. At the same time the browser can be dereferencing the N2Ls service at 123.24.24.21 to discover more mirrors for the content.

Justin’s gonna present this stuff at the O’Reilly Emerging Technology Conference this week, which is just about your very best mind-blowing nerdy entertainment value. Link Discuss (Thanks, Justin!)