On Sun, Apr 18, 2021 at 11:42:28PM -0400, Phillip Hallam-Baker <phill@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote a message of 100 lines which said: > > You have described the messages only, which alone has never been > > enough to define a protocol. > > Usually that is the case. But IP is a rather peculiar > exception. There is lots of stuff above and lots of stuff below and > there is the routing layer out to the side. But what is there to the > packet layer except the packet format I agree with you (that IP does not really fit the traditional description of a "protocol", for instance it does not have a state machine, explicit or implicit) but the same could be said for Ethernet, which was a protocol once but now is only a format.
