Subject: [hybi] Greg's proposal

From: Brodie Thiesfield <[email-masked]>
Date: Sun, 21 Nov 2010 12:41:59 +0900

All,

It appears that the inability to agree on a handshake is causing the
discussion to stall. If nothing is decided, then the current handshake
will be the winner by default. Since the current handshake has a
number of problems that have been pointed out on the list many times,
can we just agree to clean it up with the only the non-contentious
suggestions from Greg's proposal?

>From what I can see, the only part of his proposal that is causing
issues is the extra round-trip required by the hello response from
server to client having a nonce that the client must reply to. I
understand that Greg expected the client could indefinitely delay that
response until the first client -> server message, but it is still
extra to the current handshake. So get rid of that bit. Just have the
client -> server hello carry the framed nonce, have the server ->
client hello response contain the framed nonce.

We do that and we have the current handshake, cleaner and expressed in
terms of WebSocket and HTTP compliant. It is no worse than the current
handshake in any way, and in many ways better (HTTP compliance, easier
to implement, proof in the handshake the both client and server can at
least generate websocket frames, more restrictions on valid characters
for user supplied data, etc).

Agree on this bit and at least the default result of a complete
stalling in the discussions would be a sensible and HTTP compliant
handshake.

Regards,
Brodie