On Thu, 26 May 2005, Abu Khaled wrote:
What happend to the "Transparent Proxy" term. I have been using Squid for 3 years now and it was always called "Transparent Proxy". After subscribing to the mailling list all repiles to "Transparent Proxy" are answered "Intercepting Proxy". I wonder why ?!
The term "Transparent Proxy" has always meant something else:
A proxy not changing the semantics of the forwarded request/replies, as opposed to a non-transparent proxy which changes requests/replies for example image transcoding, WAP recpding or rewriting of requested URLs to somenthing else.
Unfortunately a lot of people (and a large part of the industry) also used the term "Transparent" for proxies intercepting port 80 traffic making their precense somewhat transparent to the end-user.
About 3-4 years ago it was standardized to use the term "Interception" for the act of redirecting port 80 traffic and consequently the term "Intercepting proxy" for a proxy for a proxy where this technique is ised for getting the traffic to the proxy. But many still uses the term "Transparent proxy".
To reduce the confusion "Semantically transparent proxy" is standardized for the original (and official) meaning of "Transparent proxy".
When someone says "Transparent proxy" it is often unclear what he means, even if he most often means a "(transparently) intercepting proxy".
Regards Henrik
