Re: [hybi] Proposed way forward for WebSockets

Dave Cridland <dave@cridland.net> Tue, 27 July 2010 18:25 UTC

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Date: Tue, 27 Jul 2010 19:25:24 +0100
From: Dave Cridland <dave@cridland.net>
To: "Ian Fette (イアンフェッティ)" <ifette@google.com>, Server-Initiated HTTP <hybi@ietf.org>
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Subject: Re: [hybi] Proposed way forward for WebSockets
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On Tue Jul 27 18:07:57 2010, Ian Fette (イアンフェッティ)  
wrote:
> As for compression, there are a number of cases where today, via  
> using XHR
> you get compression, and if you switched to WS you would lose  
> compression
> (unless you did it at application level, where again the latency  
> question
> would come up). Think e.g. suggest on google.com where you type  
> something
> and get back a list of suggested search terms. This is something  
> that
> compresses reasonably well and an example where we would not want  
> to lose
> compression.

Compression is an obvious extension to include in the base spec,  
because it's sufficiently straightforward to do and will prove the  
extension mechanism.

I'd also suggest considering an inline TLS switch, since that makes  
deploying TLS-enabled WebSocket applications very much easier - it  
means that the URI scheme 'ws' does not prevent encryption.

Done sufficiently cleverly, this could even be transparent to  
intermediaries aware of WebSockets, but that would need binary  
framing I think. 
Dave
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