Re: [hybi] thewebsocketprotocol #40 (new): Clarify binary/utf-8 mixed handling

[John Tamplin <[e-mail]>]

On Thu, Feb 10, 2011 at 4:47 AM, Gabriel Montenegro <
[e-mail]> wrote:

> Yes, if one accepts UTF-8, that must be validated, no question about it.
> The point is not to disallow UTF-8, but to be able to optimize on those
> websocket connections that use binary only, so this is not a fragmenting of
> the protocol any more than any other per-session negotiable feature is.
>
> From the comments, folks seem to be thinking about Javascript Websockets
> API, and how it does not allow binary nor support streaming. That's true,
> but as we've emphasized before: we're designing the websockets protocol to
> be usable with the JS Websockets API, but is not limited to it. Other APIs
> may offer both binary and streaming.


Ok, but what exactly is the benefit of having a binary-only negotiation?
 Your implementation is always free to make assumptions about the frames
that are sent by another of your implementations, so if you want to fail the
connection on any text frame that is ok.

If you mean that you would swap out a different state machine for
binary-only connections, then why is it not sufficient to choose that state
machine based on the opcode of the first frame?

-- 
John A. Tamplin
Software Engineer (GWT), Google