Interaction with tooling

[vasilvv]

I was thinking about it, and there's a bunch of tooling on the web that assumes you have a URL for your resource (for example, so that an extension could filter those). Do we want to define URL for WebTransport? Do we want it to be something we expose in the API or something we only use in tooling? If a single server is reachable via multiple transports, do we want them to have same URL, or just one URL per transport?

Probably should be discussed once we move to WICG, filing here so we don't forget.

[aboba]

If a WebTransport represents the WebSockets transport then it does make sense for it to be constructed with a URL (and to reuse the wss:// URL scheme). However, the "stream" abstraction would only be available if a connection could be established over HTTP/2 (where the "stream" would be multiplexed over TCP) or HTTP/3 (where it would be multiplexed over QUIC).

[pthatcherg]

The problem is: how does the URL's path get conveyed to the server? We would have to do it in a QUIC stream, I believe. And at that point, the client can do that in JS on top of the existing API. So we could do it, but it would just be a convenience.

Additionally, we would have to decide when the transport is connected. After the URL is sent? After it is acked? After a message is sent back on the same stream? Can you use the transport before the URL is acked? It may complicate the state machine.

[rektide]

@martinthomson this isn't closely related, but given your work on https://github.com/martinthomson/hx-uri i was wondering if you'd have any interest in this topic?

[aboba]

@pthatcherg If we were to use Websockets establishment as a paradigm, then the URL path would be conveyed in an initial HTTP request. Assuming that QUIC was supported on the server, CONNECT would then be used on the established QuicTransport to create a QuicStream with the desired properties.

[jan-ivar]

@vasilvv I'm having trouble parsing this issue. Don't we have a URI scheme already that a server sees? Is there any remaining work here for this WG?