Re: shim - transport/app communication

[Baker Fred <fred@cisco.com>]

On Mar 16, 2005, at 2:31 AM, Jeroen Massar wrote:
> the only thing an application should depend on here is that it 
> supports IPv6 addresses

If I could make a humble request here...

Could we please manage to avoid the worst of the layering faults we 
committed in the IPv4 Internet? The thing that has made NAT hard and 
made applications break crossing a NAT was that the applications know 
something about addresses. Let's not do that with IPv6 applications.

Applications should know about names and APIs, period. They should open 
a socket-or-whatever to a name, and accept that the service underneath 
gets them to an instantiation of it.

I don't object to having a service layer API produce a text string 
relating to the address-instantiation that it is currently using for a 
name, a text string that would contain a human-readable address, for 
placement in a log message or an SMTP history line. But 
please-please-please can we have the applications treat that as an 
opaque character string that could just as easily contain directions to 
the donut store?