[hybi] WG kick-off

[Salvatore Loreto <[e-mail]>]

Welcome to the IETF's HyBi WG


The Chairs (Joe Hildebrand and Salvatore Loreto), assisted by 
Application Area Advisor Lisa Dusseault,
look forward to working with you all to meet the goals and milestones 
defined in our charter:

http://www.ietf.org/dyn/wg/charter/hybi-charter.html

that clearly says that the wg consider the 
draft-hixie-thewebsocketprotocol as the input document
to standardize a bidirectional communication protocol that works 
"efficiently in as many
of the deployed environments as possible and in particular in all the 
elements of the web infrastructure"
We can use the last version (75) as baseline: 
http://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-hixie-thewebsocketprotocol

I want to stress our intent to maintain compatibility with the draft as 
it currently stands.
However, if the consensus of the working group is that breaking changes 
are required,
those will be considered after careful discussion with all of the 
stakeholders.


Our first order of business is preparing for a productive WG session at 
IETF 77.
We have requested 1.5-hour time slot (with WebEx access for remote 
participants: to be confirmed!)
because we envision a full agenda.
We are thinking about holding an interim meeting via conference call a 
few weeks before IETF
as a way to make sure that we're all prepared (we will post more about 
that soon).
And perhaps most important, we also plan to hold a less formal 
meet-and-greet in Anaheim
so that WG participants can get to know each other outside the official 
WG session.

We also envision the possibility to have regular conference calls,
between official meeting to let the work move forward as quickly as 
possible.


As evident from discussions on HyBi list there are several issues in 
the  input document that different people have highlighted.
Resolving some of them would bring value to the protocol, some other are 
more like optional features, other are questionable.

The idea of starting the work of the WG from a requirement draft is to 
give the possibility to people discuss and identify the issues in a well
defined and short time frame (a couple of months).
Having a defined set of requirement written down, is to prevent people 
to continuously argue for more features to be supported by the protocol.
We expect that the major part of the requirement will be already solved 
by the current version of the protocol, and only few will need some
extra protocol definition.

At the same time the design space draft, can be seen as an exercise to 
be sure we as group do not underestimate any aspect
of the infrastructure or any possible usage of the protocol.


The chairs will post to the list about both of those topics in the next 
days, and will also be seeking direct input from WG participants.
To start off our work in as neutral a manner as possible, one of the 
chairs will maintain editorship of the relevant Internet-Drafts
(requirements and design space), with a goal of naming editors at (or 
soon after) IETF 77.
  - If you are interested in editing either of those drafts, please 
email the chairs off-list.

Please note that we have some helpful tools at our disposal, including 
issue tracking and wiki pages, at the following URL:

http://tools.ietf.org/wg/hybi/

The suggestion is to use the issue tracking tool to keep track of all 
issues discussed in the mailing list

cheers
Salvatore Loreto and Joe Hildebrand