[whatwg] General TCP connections API?

[Kornel Lesinski]

> The client is polling the server.  And often a new TCP
> connection is created (and later tore down) each time the server is
> polled.  (Which, IMO, is bad.)

HTTP/1.1 uses persistent connections by default. If you set long keepalive  
time on your webserver, chances are that all requests are going to be done  
over same TCP/IP connection.

To have your own connections you'd have to use other port than 80 and that  
may be disallowed on many restricted systems.

If user navigates to the next page, browser will destroy your JS objects  
and close their connections. That may result in worse performance than  
with HTTP connection that is kept alive between pages.

Even if connections are limited to the same host, you couldn't safely  
serve anything else on it. Spammers might use numerous HTML-injection  
techniques to send spam using other people's computers, and this may get  
much worse if host restriction fails. From past experience of hundreds of  
cross-site scripting vulnerabilities, you can be sure that this will  
happen sooner or later.


BTW: There's a hack that lets you get data from server without polling -  
use iframe, start sending its contents and don't close connection - keep  
sending <script> elements one by one.

-- 
pozdrawiam, Kornel Lesinski