Metalinks is an effort to promote the use of Peer to peer technology to aid web administrators in keeping their bandwidth down. metalink project defines a usable and simple way to share metadata in hash and digest forms using XML.
Data integrity is getting a larger problem on the net and trusted secure bandwidth is often limited. The solution is to use encryption to ensure the resulting data is correct, which enables you to pump the data through an unsecure connection with possible data corruption. Simple because it can be detected, the changes of going to work with the wrong file are very slim.
These metadata pointers can be used by modern P2P networks to identify and gather the right data, therefore the metadata XML record is a bit like a link. Hence the name metalinks.
The good thing about XML is that it is machine readable. Using XSLT we can also make this human readable. So, opening a metalinks record in your browser will result in a simple description of the file and P2P links you can click on.
After gathering the data, the integrity can be as securely checked as the amount of metadata that is available in the metalink XML record. This means that the reciever can check the SHA1, MD5, SHA512 and others provided in the record.
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