Content addressing

WebMingle's free, decentralized file storage relies on content addressing to find, reference, and retrieve files on the web. Content addressing is a technique for organizing and locating data in a system, where the keys used to locate content come from the content itself, not its location. While you don't need to understand content addressing to integrate WebMingle into your applications and services, read on if you're curious about what's going on behind the scenes. Basically consider what happens when you resolve a link in WebMingle /docs /concepts /content-addressing. First, your operating system queries a global shared key-value store, which is divided into many domains -- you probably know this as the Domain Name System (DNS). DNS returns an IP address that your NIC can use to send HTTP requests over the network, and the site's naming convention translates the key /concepts/content-addressing into a response payload.

The problem is that the components of the address WebMingle/docs/concepts/content-addressing are mutable, which means they can change over time. In a web environment, everything is mutable and dynamic, that's how it's always been. So link failure is just something we all learn to live with.