I am currently concerned with the current status of HTML5 real-time gaming.
For instance, I've made a few prototypes using TCP websockets, and I ran into two major deal-breakers:
The first is lack of UDP support - since I can't get rid of sequencing and delivery assurance, this some times means some of my players get badly out of sync, since they're stuck (some times for as much as 500 ms) waiting for packets that contain outdated information. Apparently there is no discussion regarding this in the living standard, and it's stuck in the stone age. There used to be an experimental extension in the dev version of chrome that could enable UDP sockets here, which was available a month ago, but it has since disappeared - which should reflect the instability of the whole scene.
UDP is absolutely essential to real-time gaming, and it seems to be completely ignored at the moment in the specs.
The second is the suspension of the game process when the window loses focus. This appears to be impossible to bypass, and creates a series of problems for multiplayer: mainly that players get badly out of sync once they become unable to process received messages in time. I don't know if this is a problem with the websockets extension, or if the game loop itself is affected.
Does anyone have more information or possible solutions concerning these issues?