[whatwg] Web-sockets + Web-workers to produce a P2P website or application

[Ian Hickson]

On Tue, 19 Jan 2010, Andrew de Andrade wrote:
> 
> [...] One of the big problems with these games is the shear amount of 
> static content that must be delivered via HTTP once the application 
> becomes popular. In fact, if a game becomes popular overnight, the 
> scaling problems with this static content quickly becomes a technical 
> and financial problem.
> 
> [...] My idea is to use web-sockets to allow the browser function more a 
> less like a bit-torrent client. Along with this, web-workers would 
> provide threads for handling the code that would function as a server, 
> serving the static content to peers also using the program.
> 
> Let me know your thoughts and if you think this would be possible using 
> Web-sockets and web-workers, and if not, what changes would be necessary 
> to allow this to evolve.

This seems like a reasonable idea, but I think the way to do it is to 
invent a new URI scheme that corresponds to a distributed network 
operation, so you could just do:

   <img src="p2p://example.com/images/header.png" alt="...">

...or something.

I would recommend following up on this as an independent project.


On Fri, 22 Jan 2010, Andrew de Andrade wrote:
> 
> I'm wondering if anyone from either webkit, mozilla, opera, the W3C or 
> IETF can chime in here and shed light on what the correct process would 
> be to present this idea for consideration either as a standard (W3C or 
> IETF) or for browser adoption as open code (Webkit, Mozilla, Opera, 
> etc.)

For the WHATWG, the process is described here:

   http://wiki.whatwg.org/wiki/FAQ#Is_there_a_process_for_adding_new_features_to_a_specification.3F

For the IETF and the W3C, there are other processes, described on their 
sites. But what matters is getting implementors (a standard with no 
implementations is merely a dry work of science fiction), and so in 
practice, the important steps are more or less the same -- get people 
interested, get demonstration implementations, do research, and then look 
at standardisation.

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