Re: [hybi] hum #3: Message

[Bjoern Hoehrmann <[e-mail]>]

* Maciej Stachowiak wrote:
>In HTTP, it's common to send large entities with a length, even though a
>chunked encoding is available. In my experience, an explicit length is
>used much more often than chunked encoding, and I don't believe I've
>ever seen an HTTP message greater than 2^32 bytes in length sent with
>chunked transfer-encoding. Since both length up front and chunked
>encoding are available in HTTP, we can infer a revealed preference for
>explicit length for HTTP's use cases.
>
>What reason is there to believe that WebSocket will be different?

One reason is that HTTP responses can indicate their end by closing the
connection. I've certainly seen many very large HTTP responses that did
not indicate a length at all (finite and infinite responses). This is
very noticable because the download's progress indicator appears broken.

(I'd also attribute very little value to such observations, for
instance, it is apparently possible to conduct in-depth studies of
billions of web pages without ever encountering a single site that
delivers different content based on the Accept-Language header you send,
even if your employers main web site does do that on its main page. Not
to mention that if you have static resources you wish to add to a view,
you are likely better off sending a HTTP reference than pushing it over
WebSockets each time, so you can benefit from caching.)
-- 
Björn Höhrmann · mailto:[e-mail] · http://bjoern.hoehrmann.de
Am Badedeich 7 · Telefon: [phone] · http://www.bjoernsworld.de
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