Yes, of course. There are lots of ugly things that can
happen. You don't have to go very far to run into why. The
question is why have we insisted on not doing it right for so long?
Perhaps because others were working on the problems of application
communication without IP addresses. AMQP is one such <http://amqp.org/>
as are all the other protocols that call themselves "message queuing".
XMPP might fall into the same category (RFC refs here
<http://xmpp.org/rfcs/>)
but I'm not familiar enough with the details to be sure that it meets
the criteria for unbroken end-to-end communication through IP addressing
change events.
In many ways, this is all a problem of language and history. At the
time many RFCs were written, the world of networking was very different
and very undeveloped. Getting the bareboned basics of networking right
was very, very important. But it was less important to make things
easy for application developers or application users because the very
fact of a network delivered such great benefits over what came before,
that other problems seemed unworthy of attention. As all of this recedes
into history, the language that we use to speak about technology has
changed
so that terminology which was historically concise, is now a bit vague
and can be interpreted in more than one way. That's because lots of
other
people now use the same language and apply it to their designs,
architectures,
etc.
I think the only way to resolve the question is to publish an Internet
architecture description in today's context, that explains what the
Internet architecture is, what it isn't, and why it has succeeded in
being what it is. At the same time, one could point to other work
outside
the IETF that has worked on other problems which are related and
intertwined
with Internet architecture, yet separate from it. And if AMQP really
meets
all the requirements of an IP address free protocol, perhaps it should
be
taken under the IETF's wing.
--Michael Dillon
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