Re: FW: LC Comments: Web Method Feature

Gavin Thomas Nicol wrote:
> 
> On Friday 05 July 2002 11:15 pm, Amelia A. Lewis wrote:
> > Keep in mind, too, that ten and fifteen years ago there were vocal
> > opponents of ftp-to-email gateways and of MIME.  "SMTP is a *message*
> > protocol.  If you want to transfer files, use a *file* *transfer* protocol.
> > "  The glorification of HTTP as the highest possible layer in the stack
> > seems to reflect those attitudes.
> 
> Funny.... I used the gatekeeper ftp to email gateway to very good effect to
> circumvent firewall limitations 10 years ago. I never thought of that as
> equivalent to SOAP over HTTP before. I can see the analogy though.

The only reason there even existed a concept of an FTP to SMTP gateway
fifteen years ago was because FTP and SMTP used different addressing
models and different method names/semantics. If those were unified into
a single application protocol with URIs and a single set of methods you
could have used an "FTP client" to talk to your "SMTP server". Really an
"ftp client" would be just a different user interface for the shared
protocol. Therefore, our views are diametrically opposed to those of the
people that Ameilia quotes above. We are not trying to stop people from
solving problems. We are trying to encourage them to solve them *in the
most interoperable way*.
-- 
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Received on Monday, 8 July 2002 18:53:37 UTC