[whatwg] Web sockets and existing HTTP stacks

[Christian Biesinger]

Hi,

so I was reading the web sockets spec as well as a Firefox patch to
implement it.

Is it intentional that it is impossible to implement this spec over an
existing HTTP stack, as currently specified? In particular, due to the
strict requirements on the headers to send, it seems like you can't
really implement it with an existing HTTP stack. On the other hand,
you really do want to reuse your HTTP implementation, because
otherwise you have to reimplement all your HTTP proxy authentication,
including NTLM, GSSAPI, etc. Obviously another problem would be that
the actual bidirectional communication might be hard to fit into your
HTTP implementation, but that might be easier to work around.

Do you as the spec authors have any thoughts on this?

-christian