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Re: [hybi] Web sockets and existing HTTP stacks

Pieter Hintjens <ph@imatix.com> Mon, 01 February 2010 10:32 UTC

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From: Pieter Hintjens <ph@imatix.com>
Date: Mon, 01 Feb 2010 11:32:39 +0100
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To: Mark Nottingham <mnot@mnot.net>
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Cc: hybi@ietf.org
Subject: Re: [hybi] Web sockets and existing HTTP stacks
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On Mon, Feb 1, 2010 at 10:58 AM, Mark Nottingham <mnot@mnot.net> wrote:
> Indeed. HTTP is *designed* to allow upgrades to other protocols. If anyone wants to argue against that, they're more than welcome to come argue that in HTTPbis, although I have a feeling they'll be needing an asbestos suit...

HTTPbis sounds like a fun list.  Clearly since port 80 is often the
only way in or out of a network, upgrades over HTTP are essential for
pragmatic reasons.

Reading the discussion here over the last months, I see three sets of concerns:

1. Concerns about the quality of the web socket protocol spec itself,
which are normal and expected.
2. Concerns about the status of this spec as The Official spec for (?)
bidirectional transport over/beside HTTP.
3. Concerns about the impact that this spec has on existing HTTP stacks.

Clearly these concerns are interconnected, and that is a problem.  Us
server implementors become hypersensitive to the quality of the spec
because it appears to have an excessive sense of status AND it plays
too loose with the contracts we've invested years of work in.

It should be trivial to make Web Sockets work *properly* with the HTTP
upgrade mechanism, at which point these concerns become properly
orthogonal, and we can all relax somewhat.

-Pieter

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