Re: [hybi] BEEP

[Greg Wilkins <[e-mail]>]

Rob Sayre wrote:
> Most of the BEEP RFCs are 8 years old now, and there hasn't been a lot 
> of adoption. There might be good ideas there, but something is clearly 
> amiss. It might be the XML dependency, it might be something else.

I think BEEP suffers from the same problem that all alternative protocols
suffer from: firewalls, gateways and browsers don't let them through.

For example, XMPP has great market share - except when it comes to
webchat - where there are now a plethora of alternative protocols
for chat - all trying to work out there own way to tunnel through
firewalls/gateways and get into the browser DOM.


Thus I think these detail protocol discussions are very interesting
and a good exercise to share requirements, view points and solutions.

But fundamentally the issue we face is not *what* protocol to use,
but how to get it through the internet and into the browser DOM.

Websocket has done a great job of considering this full journey
solution. It realizes that both a wire protocol supported by gateways
and an API supported by browsers is needed.

But I think there will only be 1 opportunity this decade to make
significant changes to the firewalls/gateways of the internet.
If that is true, then is websocket the best change to make?

We could do a lot worse and the binary websocket datagrams could
at least serve as the basis for building other protocols that
can transit firewalls/gateways.   But I think we could also do
somewhat better.


cheers

PS. I love your round wheel quote!