"If you were not constrained by the limitations of HTTP, what sort of truly interactive Web applications would you build?" John Fallows rhetorically asked, before a theater filled with Web developers and managers attending the HTML5 Live Conference held Tuesday in New York. Fallows is the chief technology officer and co-founder of messaging software provider Kaazing.

The use of the W3C's (World Wide Web Consortium's) could enable a new generation of real-time, "zero-latency" Web applications whose communications requirements would be too demanding for today's HTTP protocols, Fallows argued.

As an example of Web socket speediness, Fallows showed off an implementation of the popular 1990s computer game Quake II, which Google engineers had ported , using WebSocket to bridge the server and client. Running this game online would not have been possible through HTTP, he argued.

Fallows also demonstrated a simple stock ticker, in which the values of about 10 stocks were updated every second or so, showing a near-constant flow of ever-changing values.

Created in 1991, the HTTP (Hypertext Transfer Protocol) is now used for most all of the traffic on the Web. Because it was designed for document transfer, it really isn't well-suited for modern-day Web applications, Fallows argued.