> > You miss the point. The fact that people already have port 80 proxies
> > installed doesn't matter. There's no way that we're going to standardize
> > IPP on port 80 - HTTP already has that port, and IPP is a different
> > service than HTTP.
>> > Once upon a time, a lot of people had email only access to the Internet.
> > That wasn't an good reason for forcing every service to run over email.
>> My favorite example is email over FTP. We'd still be doing email that way
> if we hadn't deployed a new email service on a separate port.
>> Ned
>>I think an important goal in distributed application design is to MINIMIZE the number of application-specific protocols required. Ideally, the designers of SMTP would have looked beyond the immediate problem of email, and devised a generic, extensible application protocol that not only met the needs of FTP and email, but would have enabled an unlimited number of additional applications. Isn't that what people are trying to do today with XML? TCP does this very successfully at its level in the stack.
I think it's a waste to have to modify the infrastructure each time you want to support a new distributed application. That's like having to upgrade your computer's operating system every time you want to install a new application: something that should be minimized.
Carl Kugler