Request to fix use of "transport"

I know we had discussion about this early on the life of the WG, but
it's recently (including in this fault discussion) become a big pain in
the rear for me to have to dance around our misuse of the word
"transport".

"transport protocol" has a very precise meaning in networking, and we
are misusing it in the current drafts by characterizing application
protocols as transport protocols.  This can only lead to confusion,
and ultimately will only hurt interoperability as some people will
choose to use the term as it was defined.  In the context of HTTP and
the Web, the word also suggests a use of SOAP that is counter to many
important architectural principles on the Web.

I suggest that we remove all references to the word "transport" (except
where we are actually referring to one, which I don't think we ever do),
and replace it with something more appropriate.  Here's a list of some
(not all) untested substitutions that *look* safe to make;

s/transport binding/protocol binding/g
s/underlying transport protocol/underlying protocol/g
s/protocol for transport/protocol/g
s/transported/sent/g (seems to cover both transport and transfer)
s/transport message exchange/message exchange/g (I think we might have
  agreed to this change already?)
s/transport:/protocol:/g

MB
-- 
Mark Baker, Chief Science Officer, Planetfred, Inc.
Ottawa, Ontario, CANADA.      mbaker@planetfred.com
http://www.markbaker.ca   http://www.planetfred.com

Received on Monday, 4 March 2002 17:19:42 UTC