Re: [Uri-review] ws: and wss: schemes

On Fri, 2009-08-07 at 05:35 +0000, Ian Hickson wrote:
> The formal registrations for the ws: and wss: schemes, part of the Web 
> Socket protocol, will be available in the Web Socket protocol ID as soon 
> as the IETF upload process completes:
> 
>    http://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-hixie-thewebsocketprotocol#section-7
> 

This looks to me like a perfect example of a case where a new scheme is
not needed, as the same thing can be accomplished by defining an http
URI prefix, as described in "Converting New URI Schemes or URN
Sub-Schemes to HTTP":
http://dbooth.org/2006/urn2http/
Note that I am talking about the *scheme*, not the protocol.  In
essence, a URI prefix such as "http://wss.example/" can be defined that
would serve the same purpose as a "wss:" scheme: an agent that
recognizes this prefix will know to attempt the WSS protocol.  But an
agent that doesn't *might* still be able to fall back to doing something
useful with the URI if it were an http URI, whereas it couldn't if it
were a "wss:" URI.

New schemes should not be created unless they are needed.  I think it
would be better to first implement this by defining an http URI prefix,
see what the adoption is, and then in a few years, *if* there is
widespread agent support for the protocol, then a new scheme may be
justified.


-- 
David Booth, Ph.D.
Cleveland Clinic (contractor)

Opinions expressed herein are those of the author and do not necessarily
reflect those of Cleveland Clinic.