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Comment by de90 | Hacker News Reader

What about WebSockets, aren't they TCP?

Not directly. More like TCP-like messaging over HTTP. The server needs to understand the websockets protocol.

Writing a basic server that strips the websockets part from messages and forwards them to a real TCP server isn't very hard, but it's still a server you need.

It's not really "over HTTP", it's just an HTTP handshake:

  The WebSocket Protocol is an independent TCP-based protocol.  Its
  only relationship to HTTP is that its handshake is interpreted by
  HTTP servers as an Upgrade request.

http://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc6455#section-1.7

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