As multimedia contents become increasingly dominant and voluminous, the current Internet architecture will reveal its inefficiency in delivering time-sensitive multimedia traffic. To address this issue, there have been studies on contentoriented networking (CON) by decoupling contents from hosts at the networking level. In this article, we present a comprehensive survey on content naming and name-based routing, and discuss further research issues in CON. We also quantitatively compare CON routing proposals, and evaluate the impact of the publish/subscribe paradigm and in-network caching.