[whatwg] Web Sockets

[Ian Hickson]

On Sun, 6 Jul 2008, Charl van Niekerk wrote:
>
> I'm very happy, just one small concern so far. Please excuse the typical 
> "African" issue but over here the networks are particularly terrible and 
> this does affect us quite badly. I would like to be able to determine 
> whether a connection has been closed by the server or by a network 
> error. I think it would be very handy for the user agent to know if it's 
> caused by unstable network connections or an unstable server and 
> possibly log this somehow and/or communicate this to the user.

You can do this by having the server send back a message before 
disconnecting.

> On the other side, this issue can also be worked around (to a large 
> extent) by getting the server to send a specific "quit" message before 
> closing the connection; if no such message is received the client can 
> reasonably safely assume the disconnect to be caused by a network error.

Er yes. What you said. :-)

> I'm not suggesting any changes at this point in time, just thought I 
> should raise this for comment.

The only way I could see to do this would be to have the server send back 
a special packet type (e.g. 0x01 0xFF) and have that trigger a different 
event, but then it would be relying upon the server to do the right thing, 
which isn't a given. Seems better just to have the author set that up 
himself if he wants it.

-- 
Ian Hickson               U+1047E                )\._.,--....,'``.    fL
http://ln.hixie.ch/       U+263A                /,   _.. \   _\  ;`._ ,.
Things that are impossible just take longer.   `._.-(,_..'--(,_..'`-.;.'