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Bug 13794 - I think length-prefixed messages would be a lot more useful than line-delimited messages. Sentinel terminators, especially newlines, are more error prone to generate and parse than a few bytes of length prefix followed by a message, repeat. In addition, t
Summary: I think length-prefixed messages would be a lot more useful than line-delimit...
Status: RESOLVED WONTFIX
Alias: None
Product: WebAppsWG
Classification: Unclassified
Component: HISTORICAL - Server-Sent Events (editor: Ian Hickson) (show other bugs)
Version: unspecified
Hardware: Other other
: P3 normal
Target Milestone: ---
Assignee: Ian 'Hixie' Hickson
QA Contact: public-webapps-bugzilla
URL: http://www.whatwg.org/specs/web-apps/...
Whiteboard:
Keywords:
Depends on:
Blocks:
 
Reported: 2011-08-16 15:53 UTC by contributor
Modified: 2011-10-04 18:36 UTC (History)
4 users (show)

See Also:

Attachments

Description contributor 2011-08-16 15:53:51 UTC 
Specification: http://dev.w3.org/html5/eventsource/
Multipage: http://www.whatwg.org/C#top
Complete: http://www.whatwg.org/c#top

Comment:
I think length-prefixed messages would be a lot more useful than
line-delimited messages. Sentinel terminators, especially newlines, are more
error prone to generate and parse than a few bytes of length prefix followed
by a message, repeat.

In addition, the ability to send blobs with newlines is a big win in terms of
the messages that are easily able to be sent across the transport, as well as
giving the developer the ability to improve the readability of the protocol
which is being sent over the wire, as examined in a packet sniffer.

Donovan Preston

Posted from: 63.235.13.3
User agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10.7; rv:8.0a1) Gecko/20110815 Firefox/8.0a1
Comment 1 Anne 2011-08-16 20:31:51 UTC 
We can always introduce a new format later. I think it is a bit too late to change the current format.
Comment 2 Ian 'Hixie' Hickson 2011-10-04 18:36:09 UTC 
EDITOR'S RESPONSE: This is an Editor's Response to your comment. If you are satisfied with this response, please change the state of this bug to CLOSED. If you have additional information and would like the editor to reconsider, please reopen this bug. If you would like to escalate the issue to the full HTML Working Group, please add the TrackerRequest keyword to this bug, and suggest title and text for the tracker issue; or you may create a tracker issue yourself, if you are able to do so. For more details, see this document:
   http://dev.w3.org/html5/decision-policy/decision-policy.html

Status: Rejected
Change Description: no spec change
Rationale: It's a text format. Text formats are commonly delimited on newlines.

As Anne says, if there's a use case for binary blobs, we can add that feature in the future.