Re: [hybi] WebSocket, TLS and intermediaries

[Maciej Stachowiak <[e-mail]>]

On Jul 20, 2010, at 11:07 PM, Julian Reschke wrote:

> On 21.07.2010 02:01, Maciej Stachowiak wrote:
>> ...
>> Also, in practice it does not seem to be the case that intermediaries
>> are updated faster than clients or servers. One of the challenges to
>> deploying new protocols or protocol features is old intermediaries that
>> are not updated.
>> ...
> 
> The same has been said about clients (IE6) and servers (Apache httpd prior to implementing DefaultType None) just within a week :-)

I can't say for sure which has the fastest rate of being updated, I just reject the premise that intermediaries are in general updated faster to a significant degree. HTTP pipelining is a clear example of a feature that is largely blocked by intermediaries not being updated enough. When a protocol feature requires client or serve updates, then often it can be deployed incrementally when only a subset of clients or servers is updated, since they can come up with a way to signal to each other. However, if it is possible for intermediaries to get in the chain completely transparently, without any way for the client or server to know they exist, then it's quite difficult, perhaps impossible to come up with a reliable signal. In my opinion, to the extent we support intermediaries, the design should require at least one of the client or server to be explicitly aware of the intermediary. We should not support magical transparent intermediaries where neither the client nor server has an obvious way to detect its existence; in fact we should design the protocol to prevent such intermediaries from being created.

Regards,
Maciej