Re: Virtual Circuit protocols => universal access

Michael A. Dolan (miked@CERF.NET)
Mon, 22 Aug 1994 13:38:11 -0700

At 08:20 PM 8/22/94 +0200, Daniel W. Connolly wrote:
>In message <9408221659.AA29976@tipper.oit.unc.edu>, Simon E Spero writes:
>>There are very few places where it makes sense to replace a
>>connection-oriented reliable transport protocol with an unreliable
>>connectionless protocol.
>
>What about a reliable, connectionless protocol, like ARDP? (Well, it's
>not really any more or less connectionless than TCP, but there is no
>connection establishment overhead in ARDP).

I think you will agree that HTTP requires a reliable transport (ie dropped
packet recovery) and, whenever the requested object is more than modest size,
flow control.

Pushing these functions up into the network application layer (ie libwww)
seems inappropriate and asking for trouble. Afterall, its all that TCP
really does.

Maybe the connection overhead concerns can be solved another way such
as with MGET, lookahead, smarter caching etc. ?

On the otherhand, it might be reasonable to implement HEAD with a datagram
if that would help.

Mike
-----------------------------------------------
Michael A. Dolan <mailto:miked@cerf.net>
TerraByte Technology (619) 445-9070, FAX -8864