Re: Decision about Host?

Roy T. Fielding writes:
 > *groan*
 > There is a whole lot of babbling here ...
etc.

Double groan.

Fine, call a program residing on a firewall that accepts HTTP requests
from the outside world, does *whatever*, including maybe even caching
results, and forwards those packets to other servers inside a network
a "gateway".

I'll take everything you said at face value except:

 > Now, what happens behind the curtains (between the gateway and the
 > origin server) is none of our business.  There is no need for that
 > communication to even be HTTP.

While it seems *possible* to take that position, it just doesn't seem
even slightly *useful*, because in practice what will be running inside
the network will be other HTTP servers, not XYZ servers using some
proprietary protocol. True, it is no longer on a public network, so it
isn't a matter of standardization that affects public traffic, but it
*is* an issue of compatibility between vendors.

Now maybe the multiple port thing is such a remote case in this
instance that it shouldn't be supported, or should be required to be
entirely handled by the "gateway". Fine. I didn't notice your message
declaring this was a closed topic.  I had mistakenly thought that working
through the implications was the purpose of having a discussion.

--Shel