Re: [hybi] An alternative design for the web socket handshake

[Maciej Stachowiak <[e-mail]>]

On May 13, 2010, at 9:08 PM, Jamie Lokier wrote:

> 
> 
> Port 80 == available near-universally; unencrypted == low overhead.
> 
> Port 443 == not available universally; encrypted == high overhead;
> certificated == impossible to coalesce by intermediaries.

Do you have evidence that port 80 is more widely available than 443?

> Port other == not available universally.
> 
> So port 80 is a legitimate thing to want to use sometimes, and it must
> have a HTTP compatible handshake due to intermediaries which intercept
> and mess about with port 80 connections.
> 
> Otherwise we're back to not using WebSocket and using hanging-GET instead.
> 
> (Now, using TLS over port 80 _after_ the HTTP-compatible handshake, for
> when you want an encrypted/authenticated connection with near
> universal availability, there's a thought...)

Port 80 already has a way to upgrade to TLS, see RFC2817. I don't think we need to create a different way to upgrade HTTP to TLS. Note that you could do the HTTP-to-TLS upgrade followed by the WebSocket upgrade to talk over port 80, though I think that would be a pretty harsh requirement for a standalone server.

Regards,
Maciej