Re: [hybi] #1: HTTP Compliance

[Dave Cridland <[e-mail]>]

On Mon May 17 13:00:49 2010, Greg Wilkins wrote:
> Websocket clients are going to receive 404's, 503's etc.
> They are going to have to handle them sensibly and report
> reasonable errors to the user.

I entirely and wholeheartedly agree. I think this is so utterly  
self-evident as to warrant no discussion whatsoever, but just to keep  
people happy, I'll continue with some examples of why this  
circumstance might occur.

Currently, in the XMPP world, there is BOSH. BOSH is a comet-like  
mechanism for tunelling XMPP (and other things) through HTTP. The URI  
is sometimes inherent in the client as delivered over HTTP; but it is  
also sometimes hand configured.

It makes sense that if we were to use WebSockets in a similar way,  
then a desktop client might initiate a session with an HTTP service  
without knowing a priori if it's an HTTP or WebSocket service. If the  
URI is wrong, the client will receive an HTTP error. This will have  
to be handled sanely by the client and presented to the user.

If anyone wants to suggest that these clients should be using TCP  
instead, I'll point out in a highly patronizing way that taking XMPP  
- a TCP native protocol - and slinging it over HTTP as BOSH sprang up  
due to this being impractical in some limited networks, so, y'know,  
duh.

Dave.
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