Re: [hybi] workability (or otherwise) of HTTP upgrade

[Adam Barth <[e-mail]>]

On Wed, Dec 1, 2010 at 9:45 AM, Roy T. Fielding <[e-mail]> wrote:
> On Dec 1, 2010, at 1:30 AM, William A. Rowe Jr. wrote:
>> On 11/26/2010 6:55 AM, Greg Wilkins wrote:
>>>
>>> And do you get similar feeling to think about using the CONNECT method
>>> to establish tunnels for arbitrary protocols?
>>
>> CONNECT suffers from the same issues you identify is deploying a new port.
>> Namely, http servers will reject those requests.  Leveraging CONNECT
>> successfully would require additional HTTP-level authentication to identify
>> users and prevent abuse (as most proxies do).  Restructuring the internet,
>> whether it is adding a new port to unblock, or permitting specific classes
>> of CONNECT traffic, would be a similar battle.
>
> Perhaps more to the point, CONNECT is a method that is only allowed to be
> sent to a client-side proxy server.  Deliberately sending it in other
> HTTP messages would be a violation of its method semantics and the
> HTTP/1.1 syntax (because its unusual target syntax is only allowed
> when sent to a proxy).

That seems like a matter of perspective.  When opening a connection to
a WebSocket server, can one not view the server as a proxy sever?

Adam