[HourglassFR]

Agree, the OSI model was what smart people who thought deeply about the issue decided we should do. Unfortunatly the timing was bad and the coherent model emerged just a bit to late. Maybe if the major networking infrastructures had been in Europe a switch could have been a possibility.

Americans are very pragmatic: make the stuff work and get on with your life, if problems arise in the future we will fix them. American standards are usually but a formalisation of already accepted practises (and this goes well beyond network stuff), this is why they are so effective and so poorly thought out. I guess it's still better than "ideals" that nobody follows.

And of course this is an oversimplification of some sensitivity difference between vast parts of the world, we individuals are but samples on the agregate sociological context that drives this sort of things.

[kortilla]

It has nothing to do with Americans vs Europeans. Plenty of Americans spent excessive time navel gazing on optimal TCP/IP replacements (tons of research on Internet protocols comes out of American universities).

First to market wins if it works and solves the problem. That’s all there is too it. Nobody is going to wait around for something that might work that is theoretically better if you have an option that works and solves your problem.

IPv6 is a pragmatic replacement and it hasn’t even meaningfully killed IPv4 despite being widely available for nearly 20 years.

[HourglassFR]

> It has nothing to do with Americans vs Europeans. Plenty of Americans spent excessive time navel gazing on optimal TCP/IP replacements (tons of research on Internet protocols comes out of American universities).

Yes, that was what my last point was about.

> First to market wins if it works and solves the problem. That’s all there is too it. Nobody is going to wait around for something that might work that is theoretically better if you have an option that works and solves your problem.

This way of framing the problem is weird to me. Markets are not handed to us by the Gods, we put them in place because some of us think they are a good way to solve problems. And in any case, consensus on green fields like networking at the time have very little to do with markets, at least in the economical sense (you could argue for a market of ideas but I don't think that's what you had in mind). But to give a famous counter example, most of the world have changed their perfectly fine system of units when a clearly better one emerged.

> IPv6 is a pragmatic replacement and it hasn’t even meaningfully killed IPv4 despite being widely available for nearly 20 years.

Not nearly as pragmatic as NAT.

Te be clear, I'm not saying that the pragmatic way is bad, in fact it's probably the best in most situations. I'm just pointing out that there might be psycho-social reasons for the non adoption of the OSI model by the network community. I could be wrong of course and I'm happy to read opposing thoughts on the matter.

EDIT: I re-read my first comment and I can see that I have been to dry in my writting and how it can be understood as "those damn Yankees are idiots!". I apologize for that, I'm trying to improve my nuances but still have a long way to go.

[kortilla]

> This way of framing the problem is weird to me. Markets are not handed to us by the Gods, we put them in place because some of us think they are a good way to solve problems.

Markets exist no matter what. I’m speaking of markets in the economical sense, not a concrete “exchanging things for money”. Look up the phrase “market of ideas” to get a better feel for what I’m talking about.

> Not nearly as pragmatic as NAT.

You are proving my point. A solution that works good enough has immense momentum because the people that care to change are dwarfed by the people who don’t want to bother. IPv6 has a pretty solid sales pitch for ISPs (CGNAT is painful to scale, manage, etc), but they don’t have any say. It’s server admins that need to drop V4 to bring any forced change... and they can’t do that without losing visitors.

> I'm just pointing out that there might be psycho-social reasons for the non adoption of the OSI model by the network community. I could be wrong of course and I'm happy to read opposing thoughts on the matter.

It didn’t offer any clear upside worth the complexity. The shared l4/l3 with TCP/IP means people can easily use the OSI model between two hosts if they want. If the OSI model was actually better for writing software, it would be widespread already.

[bnjms]

FWIW regarding your edit, I read your comment as faint and ironic praise. Specifically I had to laugh at, “ this is why they are so effective and so poorly thought out. I guess it's still better than "ideals" that nobody follows.”

[p_l]

A big source of problems with IPv6 replacing v4 is related to the same issues that plagued running the same applications on OSI protocols.

Being tightly coupled with temporary port of a temporary experimental API that happened because DoD wanted what was effectively "Emergency Capability IPv4 for Unix".

Once the broken design caused by BSD Sockets shows in one's program, it got progressively harder to fix it, especially given how ideologic the fight over APIs got. And then you had a growing installed base and vendors that lobbied against change because it cut into their profit margins, so requirement for OSI support was moved away and away.

"Good enough now" won over "won't stop working two years from now", so we built bandage over bandage over bandage.

[amaajemyfren]

Rough consensus and running code!

[dan-robertson]

I think it is often important for a standards group to be descriptive rather than merely prescriptive.

Prescriptivism nearly killed the W3C as they were sat around writing specs for xquery or whatever and meanwhile browsers we’re trying to add features while having backwards compatibility with themselves and trying to have compatibility with other browsers. Instead, the W3C should have been trying to codify the sort-of standards of eg quirks mode to persuade browsers to be more compatible with each other.

[simiones]

> he OSI model was what smart people who thought deeply about the issue decided we should do.

And yet, they came up with 2 layers of stuff that only a limited number of applications actually use (session, presentation), 2 protocols instead of one at layers 2 and 3, a much more complex layer 4 protocol. The application side of network programming would likely be much more difficult if we had used an OSI network instead of TCP/IP.

[p_l]

And yet, when I look at "everything over HTTP" (with occassional divergence to gRPC), it seems like most of it is crudely building missing layers of session and presentation.

Instead of reusing simple common blocks, we have tons of badly written textual parsers mired in historical details of early ASCII teletypes because the ARPA idea of protocol analyser was apparently "connect a teletype".

[simiones]

Many things are done over HTTP not for any particular reason of HTTP features, but because HTTP is the most accepted protocol across secured networks, and the fact that you'll easily find a package for HTTP support in almost any language you care for. HTTP is also the ultimate in portable GUI, so often you'll have an HTTP server for your product anyway, so using any other protocol besides it will add more problems.

If you try to use a new protocol over TCP, you'll quickly find all sorts of corportate networks that will drop your traffic; you'll quickly find that people are reluctant to open several ports to allow both your Web GUI and your backend protocol to talk to each other.

So at a very basic level, people aren't piggybacking over HTTP itself, they are piggy-backing onto "Most Used GUI protocol". It's true that they sometimes adopt some of HTTP's features, especially in terms of caching or common error formats, but much more often they ignore it completely (with WebSockets) or partially (binary data in POST requests with custom error messages).

Just as HATEOAS and Content-Type negotiation are extremely rarely used in application protocols, I don't think a Presentation layer would have ever caught on realistically speaking.

[rjsw]

One road not taken could have been to define a rich document format in ASN.1 and write an application to display it, maybe call it something like "a browser".