Re: [hybi] [Uri-review] ws: and wss: schemes

[Jamie Lokier <[e-mail]>]

Roy T. Fielding wrote:
> On Aug 14, 2009, at 8:12 AM, Toby Inkster wrote:
> 
> >On Fri, 2009-08-14 at 10:47 +0000, Ian Hickson wrote:
> >>I don't understand how one would reuse the http: scheme in this  
> >>way in
> >>order to connect to 'example.com' as both an HTTP server and a Web
> >>Socket server.
> >
> >The idea is not necessarily to reuse the HTTP protocol - just the URI
> >scheme. How to do this is pretty easy and would require very few  
> >changes
> >to the web sockets API.
> 
> It only makes sense to do that if the resources identified for
> websockets are the same as those for "http".  That is why xri
> was not needed -- it was a simple alias of http space.  I do not
> think that is Ian's intention for websockets (although, as Julian
> suggested, there is no documentation for that in the spec yet).

I think you're probably right that it's not Ian's intention for WebSockets.

However I can say for sure that I intend to deploy applications which
serve exactly the same resources over WebSockets and HTTP.

The technical methods used have to be very different, and once you get
past the initial URL there's a certain amount of fudging.  You
wouldn't start 1000 WebSockets connections at different URLs to access
different resources on the same server; you'd create an application
protocol on top of it, and request all the resources through a shared
endpoint.  (That's a consequence of WebSockets' design).

But the conceptual resources being accessed behind WebSockets and HTTP
will be identical in the applications I have in mind.  And the
conceptual "endpoint" resource at a single WebSockets address has a
corresponding endpoint resource over HTTP too.  So it seems natural to
use similar URLs for the two access methods.

-- Jamie