[whatwg] Feature requests in WebSocket (Was: BWTP for WebSocket transfer protocol)

[Ian Hickson]

On Fri, 14 Aug 2009, Jeremy Orlow wrote:
> On Fri, Aug 14, 2009 at 3:45 AM, Ian Hickson <ian at hixie.ch> wrote:
> > On Fri, 7 Aug 2009, Jonas Sicking wrote:
> > >
> > > I agree that these are very interesting features. Especially 
> > > connection multiplexing is something that I think is a good idea, 
> > > for the reasons you've mentioned elsewhere in this thread (multiple 
> > > widgets on the same page).
> >
> > How do you envisage multiplexing working? It's not clear to me what we 
> > could do that would be easier to handle than just having the script 
> > manually do the multiplexing at the application layer.
> 
> I could say the same thing about redirects and authentication.  I think 
> all of these features can be worked around , so they shouldn't be in v1, 
> but they should be the first things considered for v2.

Redirects are out again (due to the security flaw they introduced), and 
authentication is easy to add so it ended up being just thrown in.


> > What would the API look like?
> 
> It seems like it could be done transparently to the web developer.  If 
> you open 2 sockets to the same server, the UA could just open another 
> "channel" on the same connection.

That would force the complexity on the server-side developer, which I 
don't think we would want to do.


> > What would the wire level look like?
> 
> It could be as simple as this: An extra byte or two at the beginning of 
> every message that says which "channel" is transmitting.  A way to send 
> control messages, two of which would be used to open and close channels.

I don't understand why we'd do that rather than just use two TCP 
connections.

-- 
Ian Hickson               U+1047E                )\._.,--....,'``.    fL
http://ln.hixie.ch/       U+263A                /,   _.. \   _\  ;`._ ,.
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