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by mattvr 207 days ago
While WebTransport is promising, it's limited to client-server communication unlike WebRTC.

WebRTC supports peer-to-peer UDP connections as well. Thus it's better for use cases like low-latency games, video calling, and secure direct communication between devices.

A better push might be to make WebRTC more simple and modern, but I'm not sure if any standards committees are working on this yet.

2 comments

What do you think a more simple/modern WebRTC looks like?

* RTP over QUIC is promising https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/draft-ietf-avtcore-rtp-over...

Do you want a new PeerConnection API? Are you annoyed with the Offer/Answer model? Do you have beef with the protocols. The possibility are endless :)

In a nutshell, ideally `peer.connect(remoteId)`. An API like peer-js/simple-peer. And symmetric negotiation would be great as well.

WebRTC should be the universal networking primitive for the next phase of the web, but the API exposes too many implementation details – its abstractions leak.

This plus the overall weight of integrations limit mass adoption by developers.

> peer-to-peer UDP connections

Doesn't it require DTLS over UDP though?

Yeah, technically it's SCTP over DTLS for data channels. Only the media layer gets to use raw UDP, limiting the scope.