On woensdag, apr 30, 2003, at 20:28 Europe/Amsterdam, Margaret
Wasserman wrote:
It is an inevitable fact of physics that some addresses will be
unreachable from some parts of the network.
More like an inevitable fact of economics... Thanks to Paul Baran we
know how to build reliable networks.
Applications must deal with this (either well or badly), because
there is no other choice.
We really don't want this dealing to happen in the applications, for
three reasons:
1. Doing all the work again for each application is not a good use
of resources
2. It is much harder (or rather: impossible) to get something as
tricky as this right in so many places
3. The failure can happen over the course of a session, in which case
applications can't do anything to fix it short of implementing a
large amount of transport logic