Initial notes on Microsofts CU-RTC-Web Proposal.
“Yesterday, Microsoft published their CU-RTC-Web WebRTC API proposal as an alternative to the existing W3C WebRTC API being implemented in Chrome and Firefox. Microsofts proposal is a “low-level API” proposal which basically exposes a bunch of media- and transport-level primitives to the JavaScript Web application, which is expected to stitch them together into a complete calling system. By contrast to the current “mid-level” API, the Microsoft API moves a lot of complexity from the browser to the JavaScript but the authors argue that this makes it more powerful and flexible. I dont find these arguments that convincing, however: a lot of them seem fairly abstract and rhetorical and when we get down to concrete use cases, the examples Microsoft gives seem like things that could easily be done within the existing framework. So, while its clear that the Microsoft proposal is a lot more work for the application developer; its a lot less clear that its sufficiently more powerful to justify that additional complexity.”
