Clemens responds. It’s a bit long to respond to in detail, but I will point out another big misconception about HTTP; that it is unreliable. It is as reliable as any other workable protocol can be without being brittle, because it attempts to expose what needs exposing, and hides what can reasonably be hidden. Going back to those fallacies, number one is “the network is reliable”. This should hopefully not come as a surprise to anybody, but what might is a corrolary of that fallacy (that I just devised 8-); Not only is the network not reliable, no layer that attempts to abstract that network can be reliable. “Reliability”, in the context of Internet-scale systems, is an aspect of the coordination semantics of the over-the-wire agreement, not of the quality of service of the transport of the message.
2002/08/06
no comment until now