Re: [hybi] Subprotocol and Control Frames

[Greg Wilkins <[e-mail]>]

Mark,

I think MBWS could be considered either as a subprotocol or as an
extension, depending somewhat on what your requirements for reliable
delivery are.

If it was done as a subprotocol without additional layer of framing,
the major issue I see from lacking control frame semantics is that the
timeliness of an ack may be poor if there is a large message being
sent over the channel in the same direction as the ack.   Your
protocol would still be reliable and able to recover from connection
loss, but it may have some undue latency when informing the
application of a successful delivery.

Conversely, reliable messaging with timely acknowledgement is a good
candidate for a websocket extension, that could be of use to MBWS and
other protocols.  So it may be that the MBWS concept of a connection
spanning multiple WS connections is something that should be
implemented in a subprotocol, while the message sequencing and
acknowledgement part could be implemented in an extension.

cheers