Re: [tae] The internet architecture

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table was often out of date.)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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