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Re: WAP Is A Trap -- Reject WAP

2000-06-21 01:50:02
From: Masataka Ohta 
<mohta(_at_)necom830(_dot_)hpcl(_dot_)titech(_dot_)ac(_dot_)jp>
Subject: Re: WAP Is A Trap -- Reject WAP
Date: Wed, 21 Jun 0 5:42:32 JST

Phil;

IP over NAT is, in no way, end-to-end.

WAP and IP over NAT are equally bad.

I think you're overstating your case. Yes, IP over NAT is bad, but
it's nowhere near as bad as WAP.

If you think so, don't say "end-to-end".

If you want, it is still possible to "reconstruct" a true end-to-end
IP service by tunneling it through a NAT with something vaguely
resembling mobile IP.

You can have IP over HTTP, IP over XML or IP over WAP equally easily.

With IP over MIME you could even establish an IP connection over a mail
gateway, firewall bypassing... Hmm.... the same goes for http proxies.

The problem, however, is that the reconstruction point is an
intelligent gateway which violates the end to end principle.

Havent we learned to love and hate these breaking of layering?

You can put basically anything over anything else when it comes to just moving
bits around. While doing this we get the additional benefits of increased
propagation delay, increased overhead, often complexer solutions and a new
bag of problems in the interworking area. Lovely. We can feed a lot of
research and engineer mouths this way.

Now, while NAT and WAP both intend to solve some problems, they provide ground
for new problems which naturally require new solutions. We should really ask
weither some of these problems really should be solved within that scope or
not. If IP over WAP is a bag of worms, maybe one should bypass WAP alltogether.
Where we know that neither ATM, IP or NAT solves all the problems neither will
WAP.

It is not really what you could do as what you should do. Naturally there is
allways politically and technical preferences which prohibits some solutions.

Cheers,
Magnus



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