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Reading the replies, I somewhat doubt whether you still know what L2 means. The danger of being a nerd is sometimes you say a lot of words but they don’t mean anything.

Ethernet. L2 means Ethernet (or WiFi). Ethernet is the envelope we put Internet traffic in (L3) and the layers above that are about nailing down how exactly a conversation is managed. Sometimes people get upset about what constitutes Layers 5-7, especially since that Tim Berners-Lee joker ruined all the pretty pictures with HTTP. So mostly we only talk about 2,3,4 and 7, in the same way you don’t bring up religion or politics at a family reunion.



"Tim Berners-Lee joker ruined all the pretty pictures with HTTP"

This is the first time I am reading this, I interpret this to mean HTTP is badly designed and Tim Berners-Lee caused it. Need more...


I didn’t take it that way, I took the “pretty pictures” to be mocking the OSI model’s more ambiguous layers.


Reads to me like the design of HTTP combined 5, 6, and 7 into one.


Except now we have session and application protocols built on top of HTTP using additional software, which according to OSI would be additional layers. You can in a lot of cases use the standard to achieve this, but frequently enough we don’t.




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