[ih] History of Naming on The Internet - is it still relevant?

[Andrew Sullivan]

Hi,

On Sun, Jul 20, 2025 at 03:24:58PM -0500, Karl Auerbach via Internet-history wrote:
>
>The second is a note about the question of "what are we naming?" This 
>is particularly an issue in modern applications in which the network 
>partner of a client may move, split, or merge during a client-service 
>interaction (and thus take on different IP addresses and port numbers 
>[and different transport connections] as that interaction progresses 
>over time.)  (This is why I am so fond of the idea of an association 
>protocol layer between applications and our transport layers.)  The 
>ISO/OSI folks may have wrestled with this via things like "application 
>entity titles", but they didn't do a very good job of expressing the 
>problem they were trying to solve or their solutions.

I have never understood why there is _supposed_ to be a problem there.  DNS names are an indirection layer, and if we doubt this we have CNAME and DNAME to correct our misundderstanding.  The True Name of a thing is, to my mind, way too mystical for something like services on a network.

So, to bring this remark back to something to do with history, _why_ did this perceived need arise?

Best regards,

A

-- 
Andrew Sullivan
ajs at crankycanuck.ca