Re: [hybi] Masking only Payload/Extension Data

[Greg Wilkins <[e-mail]>]

On 11 March 2011 03:22, John Tamplin <[e-mail]> wrote:
> While I agree it is awkward to not be able to have a totally separate layer
> where the masking is removed (since you can't know the length of the masked
> frames without looking inside the masking), I don't think anyone is going to
> implement it that way.

If masking is removed from the framing, Jetty will certainly be
implementing masking as a separate layer. It would be applied
internally as an extension.

> I don't see a difference here either -- if in the future a more
> sophisticated masking is required, an extension would be negotiated that
> will change it.

But that will not be possible because intermediaries and tools will
have been written that must understand the masking, so they can
understand the framing.
We know that it is impossible to suddenly change all intermediaries or
even to negotiate different protocols through them.    Once you make
masking part of the framing, it will be there forever.

The only way to achieve flexibility with masking is to allow elements
that don't care about masking (ie most intermediaries) to not have to
implement masking.

> for example, imagine the deflate-stream extension in -06 was not
> part of the standard but a later extension.

For the same reasons,  I think deflate-stream is a bad idea.     If it
was a good idea, then somebody would have done it to HTTP a long time
ago to reduce the verbosity of HTTP headers.

cheers