Subject: [hybi] WebSockets / ECMAScript / Binary data

From: Joshua Bell <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 7 Apr 2010 11:56:32 -0700

At the HyBi meeting at IETF77 in Anaheim, the subject of binary data in
WebSockets came up. In the Jabber room backchatter, I mentioned that TC-39
(the ECMA Technical Committee responsible for ECMAScript) appeared to be
looking into binary data support, based on my lurking on the es-discuss list
(https://mail.mozilla.org/listinfo/es-discuss)

To revisit this with a bit of news:

* Various binary data APIs have been discussed, based on proposals from
community efforts - one thread from last year is at
https://mail.mozilla.org/pipermail/es-discuss/2009-November/010116.html

* In January, Vladimir Vukićević (and others) working on WebGL factored out
the "Typed Arrays" functionality into a standalone spec, and brought it to
the es-discuss list (
http://www.mail-archive.com/[email-masked]/msg03735.html)

* Since then, Vlad and others have been working to refine the proposal. The
latest is at:
https://cvs.khronos.org/svn/repos/registry/trunk/public/webgl/doc/spec/TypedArray-spec.htmland
is being discussed on the public_webgl list (
http://www.khronos.org/webgl/public-mailing-list/).

While browser APIs are out of scope for HYBI, it seemed that there was
interest from the attendees in the timeframe under which binary data might
be usable by WebSocket clients and thus important to support in the
protocol. At the risk of predicting the behavior of Web browser vendors, the
loose answer to that might be: "as soon as WebGL is deployed", which has the
potential of being quite soon... and perhaps even roughly aligned with the
deployment of WebSockets implementations in browsers.