Fred,
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.
It gets a bit more complex with multi-party referrals, but basically, yes.
All this is why we have draft-ietf-multi6-app-refer-00.txt as input from multi6 to shim6. Maybe people should send suggestions to its author?
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?