The term is often partially correctly applied in the context of the X Window System, which is able to transmit graphical data over the network and integrate it seamlessly with applications running and displaying locally; however, certain extensions of the X Window System are not capable of working over the network.
From a database management system (DBMS) perspective, distribution transparency requires that users do not have to specify where data is located.
If a connection is non-transparent, then the client targets an intermediate host (address), which could be a proxy or a caching server.
IP layer transparency could be also defined from the point of server's view.
If the connection is transparent, the server sees the real client IP.