RE: Question about the normative nature of IETF RFCs

[Bill Sommerfeld <sommerfeld at sun.com>]

On Wed, 2005-09-28 at 16:50, Fleischman, Eric wrote:
> That RFC said "hosts do X" and other devices (which in that era meant
> routers) do Y. They do Y because they are not hosts -- 

middleboxes are sometimes router-like, and sometimes host-like, and
sometimes both at the same time, and sometimes neither.

And this is just another instance whereby the specs are always
incomplete -- something new comes along which is neither host nor
router.  and, in such cases, implementors need to use their brains about
which behavior makes most sense given the context rather than
interpreting the words in the spec as if they were code.

> rather than correctly behaving as middleboxes are supposed to do.

except that I don't believe there's a single type of middlebox ...

					- Bill



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