[reedhedges]

Since this post seems to actually have been made in July of this year, does anyone who has been following WebSocket details have any comments on how this situation has changed?

My impression of WebSockets is that it's not actually a "finished" high level protocol. They could have just brought a basic socket style interface into JavaScript and left it at that. (And based on its name, that's what you'd expect at first.) But they decided to add various features, (for better or worse, I don't know yet) on top of that. (I guess part of it is the challenge of working not just on TCP, but sort of within HTTP as well). Just as you wouldn't just pick up TCP and start blowing "data" through it without some additional application specific structure, you're going to need to add your own structure inside WebSocket's framework.

[LenHolgate]

I posted an update when HyBi 13 came out; http://www.lenholgate.com/blog/2011/09/the-websocket-protoco...

The wording was improved around the suggestion to provide only a message based API.

I think the WebSockets protocol ended up being a little more than it should have been. You have to understand that it was being pulled in all sorts of directions by the working group members and that there are good reasons for all of the parts of the protocol (though some of those parts could work better with other parts IMHO). It had to be finished at some point though and I think the working group did a good job in the end.

Personally I think it would have been better had it been explicitly stream based from a user's perspective, but then I don't have the javascript/browser background to know how foolish that probably sounds.