Re: 6455 Websockets and the relationship to HTTP

On 12/05/2016 12:43 PM, Van Catha wrote:
>> I think the protocol is more likely to succeed if existing WebSocket
> implementations can transparently switch between WS/1 and
>> WS/2 transports as needed.
>
> The WiSH RFC was proposed that covered exactly this, there has been a
> lot of discussion archived in the mailing related to it.  A lot of the
> questions being brought up now have already been answered.  Specifically
> related how to keep interop between WS1 while layering on top of H2.

My limited understanding of WiSH is that it explicitly drops some of the 
WebSocket semantics in favor of a more general set of bidirectional 
communication primitives. That's cool. It's also not what I'm advocating 
for.

That said, I haven't been following the WiSH effort as much as I should, 
and the -01 draft is too sparse for me to draw any real conclusions 
from. If you have a pointer to the conversation thread you're referring 
to, so that I can read up, that'd be much appreciated!

>> Andy mentioned that an HTTP/2 transport for WebSocket might mean that
> we could get rid of client-to-server masking. I don't have any data
>> to support my spitballing, but that *could* be a pretty decent
> optimization for implementations, since they no longer have to mask or
>> de-mask the data in place. For example, it might open up the
> possibility of scatter/gather I/O for frame handling?
>
> See answer above and check out WiSH. This has already been discussed to
> great detail.

I thought the purpose of Patrick's original thread was to consolidate a 
list of concrete reasons for WebSocket to be ported to a new transport. 
If I've misunderstood that, I apologize for the noise.

>> perhaps your goal is that WS/2 should be
>
> WS/2 or simply 2 way binary streaming to drop the WS association.  A
> basic method to transmit binary data between two opted in endpoints.

In that case, your goal and my goal are different. That's fine -- it 
doesn't mean your goal is wrong -- but having you and I debate here, as 
if we had the *same* endgame in mind, is going to be confusing and not 
very helpful for many people, I think.

--Jacob

Received on Monday, 5 December 2016 21:36:49 UTC