Re: Procedural question (Re: SIP API spec)

[Steve Deering <[e-mail]>]

> Making any interface specification a part of the standard, either a
> generic one as you suggest, or a specific one as was recently posted
> to the SIP list, is a very very bad idea.

Frank K.,

I don't think Frank S. said anything about the API being a "standard",
in the sense of an IETF protocol standard.  The SIP API spec. proposes
an interface to SIP for BSD-socket-based systems, so that SIP-capable
applications might be portable from one such system to another.
Frank S. suggested that the spec be generalized for any New IP.
Sounds like a reasonable idea to me.  Similar APIs also be useful for
other types of networking systems (Streams, Mac, MS Windows, etc.).
Of course, developers are free to ignore such APIs if they don't care
about application portability among like systems from different vendors.

Note that the API is *not* the same as the "service definition".  As you
pointed out, a platform-independent service definition should be part
of any New IP protocol standard.

Steve