API that allows web applications to establish interactive, bidirectional, multiplexed network connections
It fills gaps in the web platform:
- Lack of UDP-like networking API
- Lack of WebSocket-like API without head-of-line blocking
It provides:
- Reliable streams
- Unreliable datagrams
- Encryption and congestion control
- An origin-based security model
- Bindings for QUIC
- Multiplexing with existing HTTP/3 connections
- Flexible API that can be extended to other protocols, such as TCP fallback and p2p
- Ability to change transport without changing application code
It's great for:
- sending or receiving high-frequency, small messages that don't need to be reliable (like game state)
- sending or receiving low-latency media
- transferring files
See the explainer for more info.
See the proposed spec.
Note that the proposed spec is out of date compared to the explainer because new ideas are first developed in the explainer before the spec. In particular, at this time the explainer uses ReadableStreams and WritableStreams (aka WHATWG streams) and the spec does not.