In the exchange of information over a communications channel, an out-of-band agreement is an agreement or understanding between the communicating parties that is not included in any message sent over the channel but which is relevant for the interpretation of such messages.
By extension, in a client–server or provider-requester setting, an out-of-band agreement is an agreement or understanding that governs the semantics of the request/response interface but which is not part of the formal or contractual description of the interface specification itself.
Famous quotes containing the word agreement:
“The methodological advice to interpret in a way that optimizes agreement should not be conceived as resting on a charitable assumption about human intelligence that might turn out to be false. If we cannot find a way to interpret the utterances and other behaviour of a creature as revealing a set of beliefs largely consistent and true by our standards, we have no reason to count that creature as rational, as having beliefs, or as saying anything.”
—Donald Davidson (b. 1917)