Re: [hybi] Is there a traffic jam?

[Greg Wilkins <[e-mail]>]

Ian Hickson wrote:

> I don't see any reason why this should be the case. Why would it be 
> possible to use one pair of connections with HTTP today, but not use a 
> single WebSocket connection in the future? 

Of course it is possible to share websocket connections just as we
currently share HTTP connections.

But sharing HTTP connections is currently painful and difficult and
relies on a variety of javascript/dom hacks.   It also needs protocol
support on top of HTTP to support the multiplexing.

Websockets does not help with this.  It will still be painful to
share connections and protocols to multiplex will still need to
be written on top of it.   However, with the more approachable
API of websockets, it is likely that it will be used directly
by widget/application developers (and it is "sold" as such), so
the probability of sharing/multiplexing frameworks being
widely used is small.

 > Especially considering new
 > mechanisms like SharedWorker, which allow resources from one origin to be
 > shared across multiple tabs in a browser.

Perhaps SharedWorkers may indeed help with sharing a connection.
Indeed such new features are going to be needed in the
browser to solve this issue regardless of the protocol used and
would equally apply to HTTP.

Note also that if such features do better support sharing of connections,
then good support for multiplexing becomes even more important.

regards