I think you're looking at a specialized view of the world.
In my world*, we have a variety of bandwidth methods (L0) which have specific local interaction protocols (L1) which all provide a way to carry IP packets (L2). That's the only ubiquitous facility. If you don't build on that, you're not part of the Rest Of The World, often called the Internet. Extremely common but not ubiquitous is TCP (L3) which offers reasonably reliable data streams. There are other L3 systems that make sense, but if you want reliable bidirectional transactions between nodes defined by IP addresses, TCP is a very well-debugged choice.
After that is an explosion, and some of them get highly layered. I really don't care about most of them.
*I can't claim that my world is better than yours, but I do think it is more generally applicable.
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Date: 2006-11-16 05:01 pm (UTC)In my world*, we have a variety of bandwidth methods (L0) which have specific local interaction protocols (L1) which all provide a way to carry IP packets (L2). That's the only ubiquitous facility. If you don't build on that, you're not part of the Rest Of The World, often called the Internet. Extremely common but not ubiquitous is TCP (L3) which offers reasonably reliable data streams. There are other L3 systems that make sense, but if you want reliable bidirectional transactions between nodes defined by IP addresses, TCP is a very well-debugged choice.
After that is an explosion, and some of them get highly layered. I really don't care about most of them.
*I can't claim that my world is better than yours, but I do think it is more generally applicable.