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

Kristof Zelechovski

> Since there are no legitimate casual users of the Web
> Sockets protocol that is designed to be used by Web applications only, 
there
> are no benefits to introducing the additional complexity of using an 
http
> alias.

Well, there is at least one small cost avoided by using http rather than 
allocating new scheme names, which is that those names remain available 
for use by others.  Right now, it's not to hard to find sensible short 
names for the few URI schemes that pop up, but over what will likely be 
decades if not centuries of use of the Web, there may be value in avoiding 
unnecessary allocations.

Furthermore, some would argue that there is benefit from the fact that 
deployed HTTP infrastructure can be used to obtain information about these 
resources, should one wish to (and I understand that, at this point, such 
a need is not anticipated).

I'm not offering an opinion just now as to whether the new schemes are on 
balance a good thing, just adding to the lists of pros and cons.

Noah

--------------------------------------
Noah Mendelsohn 
IBM Corporation
One Rogers Street
Cambridge, MA 02142
1-617-693-4036
--------------------------------------








Kristof Zelechovski <giecrilj@stegny.2a.pl>
Sent by: uri-request@w3.org
08/11/2009 12:35 PM
 
        To:     "'David Booth'" <david@dbooth.org>, "'Ian Hickson'" 
<ian@hixie.ch>
        cc:     <uri-review@ietf.org>, <hybi@ietf.org>, <uri@w3.org>, 
(bcc: Noah Mendelsohn/Cambridge/IBM)
        Subject:        RE: [Uri-review] ws: and wss: schemes


[1] specifically addresses the use case where the custom URL is presented 
to
a casual user.  Since there are no legitimate casual users of the Web
Sockets protocol that is designed to be used by Web applications only, 
there
are no benefits to introducing the additional complexity of using an http
alias.

 2.  Additionally, the proposed solution of using the URI prefix
"http://wss.example/" is suited for custom protocols, according to the
description at [1].  A protocol promulgated by the WWW Corporation can
hardly be viewed as custom.

IMHO,
Chris

[1] <URL:http://dbooth.org/2006/urn2http/>

-----Original Message-----
From: uri-review-bounces@ietf.org [mailto:uri-review-bounces@ietf.org] On
Behalf Of David Booth
Sent: Friday, August 07, 2009 3:17 PM
To: Ian Hickson
Cc: uri-review@ietf.org; hybi@ietf.org; uri@w3.org
Subject: 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.

-- 
David Booth, Ph.D.

Received on Tuesday, 11 August 2009 21:02:24 UTC