Re: 6455 Websockets and the relationship to HTTP

On 12/02/2016 10:02 AM, Patrick McManus wrote:
>
> On Fri, Dec 2, 2016 at 12:52 PM, Jacob Champion <champion.p@gmail.com
> <mailto:champion.p@gmail.com>> wrote:
>
>     so that existing clients of WS subprotocol
>
> you had me at subprotocol.
>
> which one(s)? Pointers to definitions? It would be interesting to see
> how well that mechanism took off - mostly I've seen it used for versioning.

If you mean the registered list:

     https://www.iana.org/assignments/websocket/websocket.xml

It's grown a bit since last I looked. Twenty-five or so?

> but secondarily, sub-protocol negotiation is part of the js api so I
> probably need a little clarification about what you have in mind as the
> gap you objected to wrt subprotocol. Thanks.

Right, the negotiation itself wasn't so much what my fear was about. 
I'll need to dig the specs out again, but the two (admittedly minor) 
gaps that I remember right now are application-data pings and 
frame-by-frame message streaming. There might be others.

(Since frame boundaries don't have *semantic* meaning in WS, the major 
thing to keep for WS/2 is the ability to send control frames in the 
middle of a very large message, which IIUC the WS API does not currently 
allow. As for pings, the data reflected by the server could allow 
clients to perform rudimentary latency monitoring or something else 
clever at the application level, perhaps for clock synchronization...?)

For the record, I'm not currently aware of a *specific* subprotocol that 
would break using only the WS API subset. That would be better answered 
by the HyBi experts, I think.

--Jacob

Received on Friday, 2 December 2016 18:37:49 UTC