Re: "wire format" and "wire-level" ?

[Sean 'Shaleh' Perry <shalehperry@attbi.com>]

On Tuesday 05 November 2002 17:44, John Joe wrote:
> sorry, this is not Debian-specific question,but i
> desparately need help. could you explain "wire-level"
> in the following?
>
> In this world, the answer is to rely on the business
> data and communication protocol headers that define
> the wire-level contract between partners and to avoid
> the use of implementation-specific tokens for instance
> routing whenever possible.
>

both of these are roughly talking about the same idea.

We as humans like to make things easy for us to understand so we cover up 
goary details.  Sometimes those details are important though.  As a simple 
example:

<xml>
  <send data="My name is Bob"/>
  <to user="jane" domain="hotmail.com">
</xml>

could be a real simply IM system.  But there are several layers below this and 
in the end a TCP/IP packet is created and sent to the receiving computer.  
You one xml command may even be broke up into many smaller packets if it 
exceeded the size limit of TCP/IP.  You as a programmer may not care, users 
definately don't.  But people working on firewalls, routers, and perhaps the 
actual IM daemon may.