[Bug 18320] Clarify how reconnection works when loosing internet connection

https://www.w3.org/Bugs/Public/show_bug.cgi?id=18320

Neil Jenkins <neilj@opera.com> changed:

           What    |Removed                     |Added
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                 CC|                            |neilj@opera.com

--- Comment #1 from Neil Jenkins <neilj@opera.com> 2012-07-19 08:11:33 UTC ---
Summarising the comments from the discussions:

At the moment, the spec states that "any network error that prevents the HTTP
connection from being established in the first place (e.g. DNS errors), must
cause the user agent to fail the connection." This means that in the event of
network loss, the UA will try to reconnect once (probably 30 seconds after the
initial network loss dropped the connection to the server), then fail
permanently if the network is still unavailable at the time of reconnection.

I can't see any use case where you *wouldn't* want to reconnect again after
network loss, so by prohibiting this in the spec, you're forcing developers to
continually re-implement the same behaviour, but with less information
available to them than the UA has. UAs are better place to handle reconnection
after network loss, as they have access to OS-level network connectivity
information so can trigger a reconnect as soon as the device regains network
access. Most web developers will find the currently specified behaviour
unintuitive (in fact most probably won't even realise and thus applications
will break on network loss), and most UAs are currently ignoring the spec in
this area.

To resolve this, the spec should be changed to require the EventSource object
to enter a reconnecting state on network loss, connecting again immediately
after the UA detects network connectivity has been regained, or if this
information is not available, retrying connection at exponentially increasing
intervals (subject to a maximum interval of, say, 5 minutes).

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Received on Thursday, 19 July 2012 08:11:38 UTC