RFC 3252 (rfc3252) - Page 2 of 16
Binary Lexical Octet Ad-hoc Transport
Alternative Format: Original Text Document
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