[rtcweb] Media negeotiation and signalling archatecture

[Cullen Jennings <[e-mail]>]

One of the complicated architectural issues for this WG is what path the signaling information gets passed over, and in the parts of that that path that need to be standardized, what does the signaling information looks like. To help get discussion going on that, I have described 3 models of how the information could flow in the some pictures in the following PDF. 

http://trac.tools.ietf.org/wg/rtcweb/trac/raw-attachment/wiki/WikiStart/RTCWeb-Signaling.pdf

I split these up into 3 models that I call High, Mid, and Low based on the path the signaling information goes. There has been a fair amount of discussion of High and Mid models in the past in this WG thought pretty much no discussion of the Low model. The interesting things is that when I look at what is getting implemented and prototyped, a lot of it is the low model. 

It certainly possible to support more than one of these but I'm interested in the pro and cons of all these but from my point of view, one of the key issues is how hard is for people to use. If you look at what things have succeeded in HTML, it is typically the things that in there simplest form provide a very simple interface to use them. Yes, they might have a more complex form that allows richer control but the basics are simple. Take the HTML5 video tag for streaming video media for example. There are zillion things that could have been passed and controlled to this flag yet the proposals that one out were the ones that provided something that was incredibly simple to use. Another example is the iPhone interface to make a phone call from the browser has been very successful from an adoption point of view.