Keith is as often the case dead wrong. HTTP works fine over non TCP/IP protocols and the ability to do so was pretty important in 1991 when IP was not considered the one true protocol. The protocol that IS essential to the working of HTTP is in fact DNS. HTTP and URIs depend upon there being a universal namespace to a much greater extent than the previous generation of protocols. It is possible to run HTTP over DECNET but doing so means that you can only access information on DECNET nodes. A significant proportion of HTTP traffic takes place over non TCP protocols today. TCP/IP is not optimized as a cell phone transport. There are true IP based browsers on cell phones but they suck really badly. My Palm Treo has the worst browser I have seen in a decade. > -----Original Message----- > From: Keith Moore [mailto:moore@xxxxxxxxxx] > Sent: Wednesday, September 06, 2006 11:36 AM > To: Robert Sayre > Cc: Sam Hartman; ietf@xxxxxxxx > Subject: Re: Last Call: 'Procedures for protocol extensions > and variations' to BCP (draft-carpenter-protocol-extensions) > > >> I want to be able to give you a URL and have you resolve it. That > >> only works if we speak the same transport protocol. > > > > Disagree. The Internet is pretty compelling, so proxies can and do > > bridge transport protocols. Applications using the HTTP stack don't > > need to know or care about the lower level. > > Disagree. HTTP proxies do exist but the only reason that > they can work effectively is that the vast majority of web > resources are accessible through a common medium - namely the > public IPv4 Internet and TCP. If the web were split across > several networks with dissimilar characteristics, it would be > much more difficult to arrange seamless access via proxies. > > > _______________________________________________ > Ietf mailing list > Ietf@xxxxxxxx > https://www1.ietf.org/mailman/listinfo/ietf > > _______________________________________________ Ietf@xxxxxxxx https://www1.ietf.org/mailman/listinfo/ietf