Re: [hybi] Multiple connections serialization and proxies

[Greg Wilkins <[e-mail]>]

On 22 July 2010 08:28, Ian Hickson <[e-mail]> wrote:

There's no lack of extensibility and negotiation, both are built into the
> protocol. Future versions of the protocol can simply define new option
> fields that the client can include to announce support and that the server
> can include to announce opt-in. For example, the client could say:
>
>   Sec-WebSocket-Compression: gzip bzip2
>
> ...and the server might then respond with:
>
>   Sec-WebSocket-Compression: gzip
>
>
Ian,

That will not work, because old versions of websocket are constrained by the
current standard to reject connections with unknown headers.     So if a
future version introduced such a header, it would immediately make new
client unable to interoperate with old servers.

If we do not allow arbitrary headers, then we will severely limit our
options for upgrading the protocol in the future.