[whatwg] Issues with Web Sockets API

[Drew Wilson]

On Fri, Jun 26, 2009 at 3:25 PM, Michael Nordman <michaeln at google.com>wrote:

>
>
> On Fri, Jun 26, 2009 at 3:16 PM, Drew Wilson <atwilson at google.com> wrote:
>
>>
>>
>> On Fri, Jun 26, 2009 at 2:11 PM, James Robinson <jamesr at google.com>wrote:
>>
>>>
>>>
>>> Forcing applications to build their own send/ack functionality would be
>>> pretty tragic considering that WebSockets are built on top of TCP.
>>>
>>> - James
>>>
>>
>> Every time I've written a response/reply protocol on TCP I've needed to
>> put in my own acks - how else do you know your message has been delivered to
>> the remote app layer?
>>
>
> Classic networking problem... if you do send the ack... how does the ack
> sender know the other side has received it... and so on.
>

Precisely, and complicated by the fact that the app layers I've worked
with don't actually expose TCP acks to the app, so you can't even tell
that the remote side has acked your packets.


>
>
>>
>> One could argue that WebSockets should do this for you, but I like leaving
>> this up to the app as it gives them more flexibility.
>>
>
> Yes.
>
> But knowing if the data your queuing to be sent is backing up in your local
> system instead of being pushed out is different than knowing if the remote
> side has received it and processed it. The former can be done w/o changing
> the websocket network protocol, the latter cannot.
>

Is the "queued up data is backing up" problem any different from somebody
doing a ton of async XHR requests, some of which may need to be queued
before being sent?
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