From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 Subject: Re: [9fans] circular logic (was webdav...) Content-Type: text/plain; charset=US-ASCII; format=flowed Mime-Version: 1.0 (Apple Message framework v546) From: Jonathan Sergent To: 9fans@cse.psu.edu Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit In-Reply-To: Message-Id: <05C3B9E5-F060-11D6-BE3D-0003939B34F8@IO.COM> Date: Mon, 4 Nov 2002 17:43:45 -0800 Topicbox-Message-UUID: 156c062c-eacb-11e9-9e20-41e7f4b1d025 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.