- From: Elliotte Rusty Harold <elharo@metalab.unc.edu>
- Date: Mon, 9 Sep 2002 10:05:17 -0400
- To: www-tag@w3.org
SEction 1 of the arch draft states: Protocols. A small and nonexclusive set of protocol specifications for interchanging information between agents, including HTTP [RFC2616], SMTP, and others. Several of these protocols share a reliance on the Internet Media Type (or, "MIME") the metadata/packaging system [RFC2046]. I am not sure SMTP properly belongs here for a number of reasons: 1. SMTP significantly predates the rest of what we call the Web. 2. The W3C has little to no involvement with SMTP. Instead, that's under the influence of the IETF (and rightly so). 3. SMTP is a very different protocol from what we normally think of as the Web. It is not at all like HTTP, FTP, or gopher. SMTP sends and receives messages between particular individuals where as HTTP, FTP, etc. place documents on servers for retrieval by anonymous people. (Yes, this a very broad cut, that ignores details like mailing lists) but at the broadest level they are different.) 4. HTTP appears to users as a client-server system. SMTP appears to users as a peer-to-peer system (actual architecture details not withstanding). Consequently, I am suspicious that principles designed for good HTTP/ FTP/etc. may be actively harmful to good SMTP (and vice versa). I do not think this document should attempt to prescribe architecture for SMTP in particular or e-mail in general. It's just too different. Note that the same arguments apply to NNTP and Usenet news. FTP and gopher, by contrast, though not traditionally W3C protocols, are at least similar enough in structure to HTTP to justify being included. HTTPS obviously can be included. -- +-----------------------+------------------------+-------------------+ | Elliotte Rusty Harold | elharo@metalab.unc.edu | Writer/Programmer | +-----------------------+------------------------+-------------------+ | XML in a Nutshell, 2nd Edition (O'Reilly, 2002) | | http://www.cafeconleche.org/books/xian2/ | | http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ISBN%3D0596002920/cafeaulaitA/ | +----------------------------------+---------------------------------+ | Read Cafe au Lait for Java News: http://www.cafeaulait.org/ | | Read Cafe con Leche for XML News: http://www.cafeconleche.org/ | +----------------------------------+---------------------------------+
Received on Monday, 9 September 2002 10:09:48 UTC