The point is, roughly, making a protocol for browsers to communicate bi-directionally with servers (that is, either side can send data to the other at any time; this spec tries to provide semantics of a TCP socket), which (a) gets through proxies and firewalls, (b) has as little overhead as possible, and (c) has no potential security vulnerabilities not already present in other types of browser connections (XHR, etc.).
Currently, the set of techniques collectively called "Comet" are inconsistent across browsers, fragile to new browser version changes, and extremely hacky.
> The application still needs to implement yet another layer to deal with the data
Well sure, the application needs to implement the semantics of whatever the particular network app is that will communicate with a method like this. But that's always been true for any application. Something like this just tries to give web applications some of the same flexibility that applications with more access to the OS, and which could therefore just open TCP sockets, always had.
Comments
The point is, roughly, making a protocol for browsers to communicate bi-directionally with servers (that is, either side can send data to the other at any time; this spec tries to provide semantics of a TCP socket), which (a) gets through proxies and firewalls, (b) has as little overhead as possible, and (c) has no potential security vulnerabilities not already present in other types of browser connections (XHR, etc.).
Currently, the set of techniques collectively called "Comet" are inconsistent across browsers, fragile to new browser version changes, and extremely hacky.
> The application still needs to implement yet another layer to deal with the data
Well sure, the application needs to implement the semantics of whatever the particular network app is that will communicate with a method like this. But that's always been true for any application. Something like this just tries to give web applications some of the same flexibility that applications with more access to the OS, and which could therefore just open TCP sockets, always had.