On 03/31/11 14:53, Bob Gezelter wrote:
Jonathan,
The WebSocket protocol currently presumes TCP as the underlying
transport.
TCP connections are an uninterrupted stream. If a packet is lost, the
connection will be aborted.
I do not believe that the TCP dependency is truly necessary or
beneficial.
WADR, it would be far more appropriate to specify the needed
characteristics
of the underlying transport. As an example, the earliest versions of MTP
(RFC 772) -- the predecessor of SMTP have successfully taken this
approach
to specification.
Just to chime in on an old thread here, since it was referenced in Ian's
recent response:
After reading RFC 772, I believe you are presenting it falsely. It
specifies a dependency on "either TCP or NCP", where NCP is the Arpanet
protocol preceding IP (RFC 772 is from September 1980; NCP was turned
off in the Arpanet on Jan 1, 1983).
RFC 821, SMTP, which was the first (and so far only) successful mail
protocol on the Internet, did a little more separation, because it
specified an explicit mapping on TCP/IP (RFC 821 appendix A), as well as
mapping to other protocols. Later versions (RFC 2821, RFC 5321) simply
said "see RFC 821 for alternative mappings", and only specified the
TCP/IP mapping.
AFAIK, all other specifications that reference SMTP refer to the TCP
mapping only, in many cases (ref RFC 1123) making requirements that only
make sense for TCP, and it's the only one that's seen real deployment.
I believe the premise is false, so it should not be a surprise that I
believe the conclusion is erroneous.
In a recent posting to my blog, Ruminations, I suggested that the
WebSocket
protocol specification be segregated into multiple RFCs, to separate the
TCP-related implementation issues from the underlying protocol.
- Bob
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