Re: [ogpx] OGPX Charter+Intro ambiguity in Virtual World vs Virtual Worlds

[Dave CROCKER <[e-mail]>]

David W Levine wrote:
>  > For example, by supporting different domain names an the exchange 
> details of
>  > protocol, a single host can run different, independent web or email
>  > services.[1]
>  >
> Absolutely. There's no internal coupling, so a host offering a service, 
> can either use multiple domain names, or, in fact, multiple ports
> to host totally separate instances. 

I needed to be clearer:  I am not talking about the underlying mechanism that
gets a particular client stream to a particular server instance.

I am talking about OGP self-identifying which particular instance of a virtual
world is the target.

By saying 'port' you are clearly referring to reliance on TCP, or the like, to
do the differentiation.  And indeed, it does help to have the (n-1) layer do
differential delivery.

But that's not enough.

Relying solely on the lower layers to do the multiplexing was a mistake that was
made for email in the 70s and the web in 1989.[1]   Each needed to add a
within-protocol construct for identifying sources and sinks independent of the
lower layer.

This is an example of an apparently non-intuitive aspect of what it really means
to be transport independent, which is a stated goal of OGP.

And as long as we've (or I've) backed into that independence topic, I should
also ask about the reliance on REST.  That would seem to make OGP entirely
dependent on the Web, no?

d/

[1] Oddly, this surfaced when a network link was set to loop-back and a host
delivered mail to itself, although it was intended for elsewhere...  But its
server had no way of knowing that the mail was intended for elsewhere.  And
confounding this was that open relaying was acceptable then, so that the fact
that the RCPT-TO field had a different domain name didn't help.

-- 

   Dave Crocker
   Brandenburg InternetWorking
   bbiw.net