Since this post seems to actually have been made in July of this year, does anyone who has been following WebSocket details have any comments on how this situation has changed?

My impression of WebSockets is that it's not actually a "finished" high level protocol. They could have just brought a basic socket style interface into JavaScript and left it at that. (And based on its name, that's what you'd expect at first.) But they decided to add various features, (for better or worse, I don't know yet) on top of that. (I guess part of it is the challenge of working not just on TCP, but sort of within HTTP as well). Just as you wouldn't just pick up TCP and start blowing "data" through it without some additional application specific structure, you're going to need to add your own structure inside WebSocket's framework.