Thomas Narten wrote:
And, if one wants to look back and see "could we have done it
differently", go back to the BSD folk that came up with the socket
API. It was designed to support multiple network stacks precisely
because at that point in time, there were many, and TCP/IP was
certainly not pre-ordained. But that API makes addresses visible to
APIs. And it is widely used today.
Thomas,
If you are citing BSD merely as an example of a component that imposes knowledge
of addresses on upper layers, then yes, it does make a good, concrete example.
If you are citing BSD because you think that they made a bad design decision,
then you are faulting them for something that was common in the networking
culture at the time.
People -- as in end users, as in when they were typing into an application --
commonly used addresses in those days, and hostnames were merely a preferred
convenience. (Just to remind us all, this was before the DNS and the hostname
table was often out of date.)
Worse, we shouldn't even forgive them/us by saying something like "we didn't
understand the need for name/address split, back then" because it's pretty clear
from the last 15 years of discussion and work that, as a community, we *still*
don't. (The Irvine ring was name-based -- 1/4 of the real estate on its network
card was devoted to the name table -- but was a small LAN, so scaling issues
didn't apply.)
d/
ps. As to your major point, that having apps de-coupled from addresses would
make a huge difference, boy oh boy, we are certainly in agreement there...
--
Dave Crocker
Brandenburg InternetWorking
bbiw.net
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