Proposal: add websocket close codes for "server not found" and/or "too many websockets open"

So the Web Socket spec is a little vague on how JS is notified when
the targeted web socket server is down/nonexistent/etc.

Firefox is firing an 'error' event when this happens, based on the
language here in the W3C spec:

  "if the status code received from the server is not 101 (e.g. it is
a redirect), the user agent must fail the websocket connection"

Chrome is not calling onerror for this, so we have a difference here.
 The language in the spec isn't really clear if this covers the
connection-never-happened case.

Both Chrome and Firefox (haven't tested other browsers/clients) are
then calling close with code=1006, which seems the best code available
in RFC 6455, but the language there isn't great either:

   "to indicate that the connection was closed abnormally, e.g.,
without sending or receiving a Close control frame."

There's essentially no mention in either spec of what happens when
there never was any connection to the server..

It would be useful to be clear about whether onerror should be called
here.   I'm also wondering if it would be useful to have a dedicated
error code for this case ("server not available').

Also:  I expect every browser that implements web sockets will have
some limit on the number of websockets it allows to be open at once
(to prevent DoS attacks if nothing else).   I'm not sure of what the
right close code for this is.  Ideas?  Perhaps we could also use a
dedicated code for this case too.

Jason Duell
Mozilla

Received on Saturday, 19 May 2012 05:41:11 UTC