- From: Dave Long <dave@navisoft.com>
- Date: Fri, 29 Dec 1995 20:35:30 -0800
- To: Larry Masinter <masinter@parc.xerox.com>
- Cc: http-wg%cuckoo.hpl.hp.com@hplb.hpl.hp.com
A mini-rant, from the application developer's perspective. It's certainly worth considering low-level transport issues when working on these protocols, however: * As an apps guy, I have _no control_ over the stack underneath me. Unix boxes tend to implement TCP very well. WINSOCKs come in all flavors, some better than others. We've even used a package on the Mac that required a patch to select() to report reset connections. * Is HTTP tied to TCP? I tend to think that many of the "problems" that HTTP-NG addresses are actually with TCP, not HTTP itself. We've done work for firms that (horrors!) don't run a TCP network, but they still see that value of HTTP as a backbone IS protocol. So, when I see references to "advertising different window sizes", or "doing a half-duplex shutdown()", I think that it's nice to know that we can optimize implementations for the commonly used (and correctly implemented!) transports, but it's much more important that the HTTP protocol solve problems *at its level of abstraction*, without making unusual demands upon the transport. Not usually such a luddite, -Dave
Received on Friday, 29 December 1995 20:39:38 UTC