People who are designing message interchange frameworks that might need to become Internet-scale should consider this, and be careful of architectures that don't fall into one of these two baskets, because nothing else has yet been shown to work.
What about DNS? I don't think that one can generalize DNS into one of those two baskets, but it certainly scaled to Internet size.
I suppose one could argue that DNS follows a Post-and-Poll messaging framework, but then you have to ignore SOA and the hierarchy of .tld's and such. So, if DNS can be generalized into a "Post-and-Poll" style messaging framework, then an internal combustion engine could, too.
Comments
From the original [with my comments intertwined]:
"post-and-poll, scales up too. It works like this: I post some data [hostname] which contains either messages or message pointers to a public place[IP address], and you poll [nslookup] periodically [TTL] to see what’s new"
How in the world would that NOT fit DNS?
The engine periodically "polls" the "tank" for "gasoline" and "posts" it into the cylinders for use.
How in the world would that NOT fit INTERNAL COMBUSTION ENGINES?
[One of] My point[s] is this, at some level of "abstraction", anything could be modified to fit the "post-pull" messaging system.
Don't Let Architecture Astronauts Scare You
DNS cannot be generalized into a simple post-pull messaging framework.