- From: <noah_mendelsohn@us.ibm.com>
- Date: Wed, 12 Aug 2009 09:47:46 -0400
- To: Maciej Stachowiak <mjs@apple.com>
- Cc: "Daniel R. Tobias" <dan@tobias.name>, David Booth <david@dbooth.org>, hybi@ietf.org, uri@w3.org, "David Orchard" <orchard@pacificspirit.com>
Maciej Stachowiak writes: > I also do not believe it is an advantage for legacy clients to > dereference wss: hosts via http; it hypothetically sounds neat but I > cannot think of a use case where it would actually be beneficial. This > is not necessarily a disadvantage, but it doesn't seem like much of an > advantage either. So, here's an example. First, let's make the assumption that there is an HTTP server at port 80 at "http://wss.example/", presumably run by an organization that supports the use of wss. Assuming that the normal path through the Web sockets client apis does not access this, the HTTP server will be used only by legacy clients. Where's the value? Let's assume that a link to a WS resource winds up in a page somewhere for some reason. It could be a bug report, whatever. Now a search engine crawler stumbles on the bug report page. If we use the wss: scheme, then either the crawler has special knowledge of WS, or nothing much useful happens. If we use "http://wss.example/..... then the crawler sends a GET to that. Choose your favorite metadata access mechanism (perhaps [1], maybe RDFa, whatever), and the crawler has the opportunity to discover "ah, this is a WS resource", or at least to learn some things about it. To some extent that's true with either approach (the crawler at least knows it's got a link in a scheme that's not understood with wss:), but the opportunities for incremental discovery seem to be significantly greater with HTTP. As Dave Orchard points out, these issues were debated in great detail with XRI came up for consideration at Oasis, and I think it's fair to say that the starting position of those proposing xri was initially at least as firm as that of advocates of wss. I think Dave is right that at least many of those same people came to believe that an http-based approach was in fact either better, or at least a reasonable compromise. You might want to check with them. Noah [1] http://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-hammer-discovery-02 [2] http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/uri/2009Aug/0027.html -------------------------------------- Noah Mendelsohn IBM Corporation One Rogers Street Cambridge, MA 02142 1-617-693-4036 --------------------------------------
Received on Wednesday, 12 August 2009 13:48:30 UTC