Translation

English
`0` : `0110000b`
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English French Actions
Alice : `Thank you` Alice : `Merci`
Bob : `You're welcome` Bob : `Avec plaisir`
Such a conversation succeeds if both Alice and Bob speak the same language. If Alice meets Tchang who only speaks Chinese, she won't be able to ask him the current time. A conversation between humans can be more complex. For example, assume that Bob is a security guard whose duty is to only allow trusted secret agents to enter a meeting room. If all agents know a secret password, the conversation between Bob and Trudy could be as follows :
Bob : `What is the secret password ?`
Trudy : `1234` Trudy : `1234`
Bob : `This is the correct password, you're welcome`
If Alice wants to enter the meeting room but does not know the password, her conversation could be as follows :
Alice : `3.1415` Alice : `3.1415`
Bob : `This is not the correct password.` Bob : `Ce n'est pas le bon mot de passe.`
Let us first discuss the syntactical rules. We will later explain how the information flow can be organized by analyzing real networked applications.
Application-layer protocols exchange two types of messages. Some protocols such as those used to support electronic mail exchange messages expressed as strings or lines of characters. As the transport layer allows hosts to exchange bytes, they need to agree on a common representation of the characters. The first and simplest method to encode characters is to use the :term:`ASCII` table. :rfc:`20` provides the ASCII table that is used by many protocols on the Internet. For example, the table defines the following binary representations :
`A` : `1000011b`
`0` : `0110000b`
`z` : `1111010b`
`@` : `1000000b`
`space` : `0100000b`
In addition, the :term:`ASCII` table also defines several non-printable or control characters. These characters were designed to allow an application to control a printer or a terminal. These control characters include `CR` and `LF`, that are used to terminate a line, and the `Bell` character which causes the terminal to emit a sound.
`carriage return` (`CR`) : `0001101b`
`line feed` (`LF`) : `0001010b`
`Bell`: `0000111b`
The :term:`ASCII` characters are encoded as a seven bits field, but transmitted as an eight-bits byte whose high order bit is usually set to `0`. Bytes are always transmitted starting from the high order or most significant bit.
Most applications exchange strings that are composed of fixed or variable numbers of characters. A common solution to define the character strings that are acceptable is to define them as a grammar using a Backus-Naur Form (:term:`BNF`) such as the Augmented BNF defined in :rfc:`5234`. A BNF is a set of production rules that generate all valid character strings. For example, consider a networked application that uses two commands, where the user can supply a username and a password. The BNF for this application could be defined as shown in the figure below.
A simple BNF specification
The example above defines several terminals and two commands : `usercommand` and `passwordcommand`. The `ALPHA` terminal contains all letters in upper and lower case. In the `ALPHA` rule, `%x41` corresponds to ASCII character code 41 in hexadecimal, i.e. capital `A`. The `CR` and `LF` terminals correspond to the carriage return and linefeed control characters. The `CRLF` rule concatenates these two terminals to match the standard end of line termination. The `DIGIT` terminal contains all digits. The `SP` terminal corresponds to the white space characters. The `usercommand` is composed of two strings separated by white space. In the ABNF rules that define the messages used by Internet applications, the commands are case-insensitive. The rule `"user"` corresponds to all possible cases of the letters that compose the word between brackets, e.g. `user`, `uSeR`, `USER`, `usER`, ... A `username` contains at least one letter and up to 8 letters. User names are case-sensitive as they are not defined as a string between brackets. The `password` rule indicates that a password starts with a letter and can contain any number of letters or digits. The white space and the control characters cannot appear in a `password` defined by the above rule.
Besides character strings, some applications also need to exchange 16 bits and 32 bits fields such as integers. A naive solution would have been to send the 16- or 32-bits field as it is encoded in the host's memory. Unfortunately, there are different methods to store 16- or 32-bits fields in memory. Some CPUs store the most significant byte of a 16-bits field in the first address of the field while others store the least significant byte at this location. When networked applications running on different CPUs exchange 16 bits fields, there are two possibilities to transfer them over the transport service : Outre les chaînes de caractères, certaines applications doivent également échanger des champs de 16 et 32 bits tels que des entiers. Une solution naïve aurait été d'envoyer le champ de 16 ou 32 bits tel qu'il est codé dans la mémoire de l'hôte. Malheureusement, il existe différentes méthodes pour stocker les champs de 16 ou 32 bits en mémoire. Certains processeurs stockent l'octet le plus significatif d'un champ de 16 bits dans la première adresse du champ, tandis que d'autres stockent l'octet le moins significatif à cet endroit. Lorsque des applications en réseau fonctionnant sur des unités centrales différentes échangent des champs de 16 bits, il existe deux possibilités pour les transférer via le service de transport :
send the most significant byte followed by the least significant byte envoyer l'octet le plus significatif suivi de l'octet le moins significatif
send the least significant byte followed by the most significant byte envoyer l'octet le moins significatif suivi de l'octet le plus significatif
The first possibility was named `big-endian` in a note written by Cohen [Cohen1980]_ while the second was named `little-endian`. Vendors of CPUs that used `big-endian` in memory insisted on using `big-endian` encoding in networked applications while vendors of CPUs that used `little-endian` recommended the opposite. Several studies were written on the relative merits of each type of encoding, but the discussion became almost a religious issue [Cohen1980]_. Eventually, the Internet chose the `big-endian` encoding, i.e. multi-byte fields are always transmitted by sending the most significant byte first, :rfc:`791` refers to this encoding as the :term:`network-byte order`. Most libraries [#fhtonl]_ used to write networked applications contain functions to convert multi-byte fields from memory to the network byte order and the reverse.

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String information

Source string location
../../principles/transport.rst:63
String age
5 years ago
Source string age
5 years ago
Translation file
locale/fr/LC_MESSAGES/principles/transport.po, string 28