Invitation to collaborate on Metalink and improve downloading & the open web
Ant Bryan
This is an invitation to people from Mozilla and other browser/
download application makers to collaborate on Metalink.
Metalink has the potential to improve the usability of the Internet at
a large scale, particularly for users in countries with poor Internet
connectivity (but also for others).
Error correction, increased security, and failover to alternate
mirrors are some of the benefits.
Metalink is an XML file format & feature set that download apps
support to offer improved downloads.
It's developed by an open source community project that, after 3.5
years, is currently in Internet Draft form at the IETF [1].
About 50 apps currently support Metalink, including browsers, FTP
clients, P2P apps, download managers, and the popular Firefox addon
DownThemAll! [2]
Metalink is frequently used by open source projects like
OpenOffice.org, and many Linux distributions.
http://www.metalinker.org
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metalink
Mozilla bug: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=331979
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(( Anthony Bryan ... Metalink [ http://www.metalinker.org ]
)) Easier, More Reliable, Self Healing Downloads
[1] http://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-bryan-metalink
[2] http://www.metalinker.org/images/dta_ubuntu.png