Re: Taxonomy draft, draft-melve-wrec-taxonomy-00.txt

From: Henrik Nordstrom (hno@hem.passagen.se)
Date: Fri Jun 18 1999 - 19:01:51 MDT


Ingrid Melve wrote:

> How about using your comment as definition of transparent proxying,
> then remove transparent proxy and define either transparent redirection or
> traffic interception ?

Yes please. HTTP 1.1 already defines the term "transparent proxy", and
it is confusing to have more than one definition for the same term (even
thought, when most people speak about transparent proxying/caching they
are talking about transparent traffic redirection to a proxy/cache, not
a transparent proxy).

RFC 2616 (HTTP/1.1 draft standard), 1.3 Terminology

  proxy
      [...]
      "transparent proxy" is a proxy that does not modify the request or
      response beyond what is required for proxy authentication and
      identification. A "non-transparent proxy" is a proxy that modifies
      the request or response in order to provide some added service to
      the user agent, such as group annotation services, media type
      transformation, protocol reduction, or anonymity filtering. Except
      where either transparent or non-transparent behavior is explicitly
      stated, the HTTP proxy requirements apply to both types of
      proxies.

And related to this it also defines transparency for a cache

   semantically transparent
      A cache behaves in a "semantically transparent" manner, with
      respect to a particular response, when its use affects neither the
      requesting client nor the origin server, except to improve
      performance. When a cache is semantically transparent, the client
      receives exactly the same response (except for hop-by-hop headers)
      that it would have received had its request been handled directly
      by the origin server.

Neither of these "transparent" definitions has anything to do with
traffic interception/redirection.

--
Henrik Nordstrom
Spare time Squid hacker



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