Re: [whatwg/url] Addressing HTTP servers over Unix domain sockets (#577)

It's the same protocol over a stream socket, just a different address (ie. authority part).  Ok, so it's a different protocol in the sense of IP, but so are IPPROTO_IP and IPPROTO_IPV6, and the URL standard doesn't treat those as different.  The relevant comparison I think are address families for stream sockets, like AF_INET, AF_INET6 and AF_UNIX.  Once the stream socket has been established (as specified by the authority part of the URL), HTTP software shouldn't care or even know how the stream is transported.

Most invented, non-standard approaches for HTTP-over-unix-sockets seem to gravitate to something like a different scheme (since the authority part can't really be disambiguated from a hostname if relative socket paths are allowed from what I can see), like http+unix or https+unix, and then percent-encoding the socket into the authority part, and then everything works naturally from there from what I can see.

I've also seen (and used) enclosing the socket path in [] in the authority part and keeping the scheme as http or https, but I think that namespace clashes with IPv6 style numeric addresses like [::1]:80.  RFC 3986 (in section 3.2.2) kind of leaves space for this by anticipating future formats within the [], and providing a version prefix to disambiguate them.  Overall I like this approach the best (it extends into the error space so it doesn't change the interpretation of any valid existing URL, lives in an extension space envisioned by the standard, minimally extends just the appropriate part of the standard (authority part), keeps the schemes http and https to mean "this is a resource we talk to this authority using the http(s) protocol for", and so preserves compatibility for software that uses the scheme to know what protocol to speak with the authority over the socket.

-- 
You are receiving this because you are subscribed to this thread.
Reply to this email directly or view it on GitHub:
https://github.com/whatwg/url/issues/577#issuecomment-960517761