RFC 3252 (rfc3252) - Page 2 of 16

Binary Lexical Octet Ad-hoc Transport

RFC 3252         Binary Lexical Octet Ad-hoc Transport      1 April 2002


   parsing to the XML toolset.  The use of XML also mitigates concerns
   over "network vs. host" byte ordering which is at the root of many
   network application bugs.

1.3. Relation to Existing Protocols

   The reformulations specified in this RFC follow as closely as
   possible the spirit of the RFCs on which they are based, and so MAY
   contain elements or attributes that would not be needed in a pure
   reworking (e.g. length attributes, which are implicit in XML.)

   The layering of network and transport protocols are maintained in
   this RFC despite the optimizations that could be made if the line
   were somewhat blurred (i.e. merging TCP and IP into a single, larger
   element in the DTD) in order to foster future use of this protocol as
   a basis for reformulating other protocols (such as ICMP.)

   Other than the encoding, the behavioral aspects of each of the
   existing protocols remain unchanged.  Routing, address spaces, TCP
   congestion control, etc. behave as specified in the extant standards.
   Adapting to new standards and experimental algorithm heuristics for
   improving performance will become much easier once the move to BLOAT
   has been completed.

1.4. Requirement Levels

   The key words "MUST", "MUST NOT", "REQUIRED", "SHALL", "SHALL NOT",
   "SHOULD", "SHOULD NOT", "RECOMMENDED", "MAY", and "OPTIONAL" in this
   document are to be interpreted as described in BCP 14, RFC 2119
   [RFC 2119].

2.   IPoXML

   This protocol MUST be implemented to be compliant with this RFC.
   IPoXML is the root protocol REQUIRED for effective use of TCPoXML
   (section 3.) and higher-level application protocols.

   The DTD for this document type can be found in section 7.1.

   The routing of IPoXML can be easily implemented on hosts with an XML
   parser, as the regular structure lends itself handily to parsing and
   validation of the document/datagram and then processing the
   destination address, TTL, and checksum before sending it on to its
   next-hop.

   The reformulation of IPv4 was chosen over IPv6 [RFC 2460] due to the
   wider deployment of IPv4 and the fact that implementing IPv6 as XML
   would have exceeded the 1500 byte Ethernet MTU.



Kennedy                      Informational