> From: Tony Li <[email protected]>
> Our job isn't to articulate common usage; it's to define what the
> terminology should be.
I disagree, because in my experience, trying to re-define terms which are
already in common use is a non-starter.
So the best we can do for the Big Three (address, locator, identifier) is to
come up with definitions which reasonly match what they mean to _most_ people
now, and hope that the outliers eventually give up on their idiosyncratic
personal definitions, and start using the one most people have.
For the Big Three, I think your version of Sat, 28 Mar 2009 20:44:11 (perhaps
very subtle tweaked) is about as good as we can get. Note that the
definitions for those three will have to be a little 'loose', because if you
make them _more_ specific, you will start to loose people from the "_most_
people" pot above.
If we need terms for very specific things, we need to pick new words. In
particular, the concept of 'field(s) in the header which a packet switch
looks at to pick the next hop' is a concept which, AFAIK, does _not_ have a
well-known term - and there's a perfect place for some new terminology.
> Differentiating between destinations and waypoints seems to me to be
> more about the forwarding mechanism than about the namespace itself.
Exactly. To me, a location in the network connectivity graph is just.. a
location in the network connectivity graph. (Which leads to 'locator: name of
a location in the network connectivity graph' - perhaps you could put that in
as an alternative definition.)
Note also (in light of some other comments here that I don't have time to
reply to in detail) that in general, the 'name of the location' is only
actually _used_ at the internetwork level (for getting user traffic to the
named location).
It may seem that higher-level entities _also_ have locations; e.g. if you
have a application which is running in a stack has only a single interface,
that application also 'sort of' has a location. _However_, as soon as you say
that a higher-level thing can be reached through more than one place in the
network (or 'attached to more than one place in the network') - which is what
multi-homing is - then the thing no longer has 'a' location.
So either i) higher-level things can have more than one 'location' at a time
(which is a slightly counter-intuitive property of 'location of a thing', for
non-quantum-mechanicians), or ii) higher-level things do not in fact actually
have locations - we just have the illusion that they do, in simple cases.
Noel
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