Re: [hybi] Serf support for BWTP

[Ian Hickson <[e-mail]>]

On Fri, 18 Dec 2009, Justin Erenkrantz wrote:
> 
> If ya'll haven't followed the Twitter conversation between me and Hixie 
> over the last few days, I've pretty much come to the same conclusions 
> regarding "Web Sockets" RFC that Greg Wilkins did much earlier.  (Kudos 
> to Greg!)  I guess that Hixie has tried to write his RFC drafts in a way 
> that stresses one particular way of writing a client - but for a pure 
> async client library like Serf, the description in the RFC is pretty 
> impenetrable...and, in my mind, not very helpful when it comes to 
> writing an independent implementation.

I've tried to address some of this feedback in the spec, in particular 
rewriting some sections to be more straight-forward about what needs 
implementing. While it is still very specific about normative conformance 
criteria, rather than being an abstract description of an idealised 
protocol [1], it should at least be more readable now. If you have any 
specific feedback about specific sections that need changing, it would be 
great if you could send it to this list.

(I'm going through feedback received in the past month now, and have 
reached feedback sent up to mid-December; if you send feedback after then, 
I should reply to it soon.)


[1] I'm convinced, based on experience with a number of other 
specifications for Web standards, that the abstract style leads to 
significantly more implementation bugs and interoperability problems than 
the more imperative style the spec currently uses. I'm not convinced it's 
possible to sanely define all the error handling rules needed to get good 
interop on the Web without having explicit sections for clients and 
servers. The HTTP specs, the URI specs, HTML4, and CSS1 are the four 
examples I'm most familiar with that demostrate this most clearly.

-- 
Ian Hickson               U+1047E                )\._.,--....,'``.    fL
http://ln.hixie.ch/       U+263A                /,   _.. \   _\  ;`._ ,.
Things that are impossible just take longer.   `._.-(,_..'--(,_..'`-.;.'