Re: [9fans] circular logic (was webdav...)

[Jonathan Sergent <sergent@IO.COM>]

On Monday, Nov 4, 2002, at 14:27 US/Pacific, Russ Cox wrote:
> non-http protocols are dangerous.
> therefore we'll only allow http.

This is an oversimplification.  The companies that I know that have
this problem are actually in a situation where they have an internal
network that is not directly routed to the Internet at all, and all
traffic must pass through application-layer gateways (aka proxies).
The protocols which are proxied tend to vary.  But everyone proxies
HTTP in this environment.

There often isn't an intent to stop the use of other applications; just
no resources (time and money) to explicitly enable them.

It seems to me like this sort of thing is going away and becoming less
common, not more common.

(If everyone used Plan 9 and people could just import /net, this
problem wouldn't exist... people in these environments would just
tunnel everything over 9P!  Is this any more acceptable?)

> only http is allowed.
> therefore we'll tunnel everything over http.

So often this is a matter of resources; if the application developer
knows that in some situations only HTTP is allowed, but doesn't want to
write everything for both cases, said application developer will tend
to just do everything over HTTP so that it "just works" for people on
weird networks.


--jss.