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
