on 5/30/2003 1:36 AM Dave Crocker wrote: > HTTP can reasonably be considered a replacement for Anonymous FTP, > during an academic discussion. The massive difference in the service > experience makes this a less-than-practical comparison, when discussion > an email transition. So does the massive difference in scaling issues > for the 1989 timeframe, versus now. > > The POP->IMAP example is excellent, since it really demonstrates my > point. IMAP is rather popular in some local area network environments. > However it's long history has failed utterly to seriously displace POP > on a global scale.
I would not disagree with your assessments other than to say that the comparisons aren't exactly applicable. Specifically, you don't have to upgrade every client in the world for the transition to work. As a matter of deployment, you only have to upgrade the MTAs. The submission service can still be SMTP or whatever you want; as long as the server which first puts the message into the ng stream is ng-compliant *AND* that server is capable of providing the identity information, then the first-hop(s) don't really have to be ng-compliant for the scheme to work. Asking for examples of upgrades involving hundreds of millions of clients isn't really an applicable exercise. The examples I gave are useful to the extent that they demonstrate a willingness to move critical technology in varying scales. > Seriously folks, if discussion about changes is going to be productive, > it needs to pay much more realistic attention to history and pragmatics > of ISP operations and average-user preferences. Let's not overdo it either. -- Eric A. Hall http://www.ehsco.com/ Internet Core Protocols http://www.oreilly.com/catalog/coreprot/
