Subject: [hybi] Who's buy-in we need

From: Adam Barth <[email-masked]>
Date: Sat, 31 Jul 2010 10:37:37 -0700

On Sat, Jul 31, 2010 at 12:21 AM, Greg Wilkins <[email-masked]> wrote:
> Besides, I think that  the IETF process needs to participation of the
> browser vendors to be able to create any meaningful protocol.    Also, the
> browser vendors need buy-in from server-side, intermediary and other
> interests that are represented in the IETF.
>
> Together we can do something. Apart we are all just pissing in the wind.

In all honesty, getting buy-in from browser vendors is much more
important than getting buy-in from server operators or (especially)
from intermediaries.  It might be a pleasant fiction to imagine that
we should consider everyone's input equally, but that's not actually
the best strategy for actually getting wide adoption.

Imagine that browser vendors ignore feedback from server operators and
intermediaries and plow ahead with whatever they think is best.  If
they do a even a half-decent job, WebSockets will provide an
attractive value proposition for web developers.  If the protocol is
trivially implementable, web developers will stand up custom WebSocket
servers on their EC2 servers and folks like Ruby-on-Rails will add
support to their frameworks.

As a point of reference, compare that story with the history of comet.
 I think you'll agree that no sane person would advocate for comet
being a reasonable protocol.  However, browser vendors shipped the
necessary components (perhaps unwittingly), and folks like Alex
Russell [1] figured out how to cobble together the pieces, and comet
has achieved quite broad adoption.

You're welcome to alienate browser vendors from this working group,
but the net result will be that the working group has much less impact
on the world.  Now, if you let Ian dictate the entire protocol, the
working group also won't have any impact, so there's some balance to
strike.

The path to success for this working group, in my opinion, is to
understand the desires and requirements of browser vendors and to
design a protocol that meets those requirements better than the
current draft.  That means, for example, you should listen carefully
to what Mike Belshe, Rob Sayre, Maciej Stachowiak, and Anne van
Kesteren say.  They form an important constituency.

You might be sad that the balance of power is so tilted in the
direction of browser vendors, but I think that's the truth.  No amount
of emails to this mailing list will change that market force.

Adam

[1] http://alex.dojotoolkit.org/2006/03/comet-low-latency-data-for-the-browser/

---

From: Salvatore Loreto <[email-masked]>
Date: Sat, 31 Jul 2010 20:02:09 +0200

the chairs and the Area Directors are very well aware of the importance 
of having all the browser vendors full involved in the process,
as well as the server side and work all together to let the 
specification move forward.

at the Friday meeting we had a great participation from browser vendors,
we had people from Google, Opera and Microsoft...
(unfortunately people from Mozilla were unable to attend this time, and 
there were nobody from Apple)
and we reached large consensus on several items from the people in the 
room and people in the jabber.

The chairs are going to send out all the hum we had during the meeting 
just to check if someone has technical objection to them.
The next version of the Requirement draft, as well as the Protocol draft 
will have to reflect the consensus that has been reached.

We will send out in the ml also the meeting notes, but please consider 
that today and tomorrow people are flying back to home!
So I beg you to be patient for the weekend, I am myself still on my way 
to home.

ciao
/Sal

On 7/31/10 7:37 PM, Adam Barth wrote:
> On Sat, Jul 31, 2010 at 12:21 AM, Greg Wilkins<[email-masked]>  wrote:
>    
> _______________________________________________
> hybi mailing list
> [email-masked]
> https://www.ietf.org/mailman/listinfo/hybi
>    

-- 
Salvatore Loreto
www.sloreto.com