Would you use a library or framework that dealt with some of the browser issues? If so, what kinds of things would you be looking for in such a framework?
I'm not saying you can't do it. Make is really powerful and fun once you take a few minutes to think about how it is supposed to work (rules that generate file outputs), but a lot of programmers don't (who treat rules as procedures resulting in a file thats 90% phony rules). You have to be very careful with define to generate rules. Just be aware there are syntax pitfalls, compatibility pitfalls (between relatively recent versions of make), and just confusion if you aren't clear on what you're doing.
Oh god, this way lies madness. :) It really does. Once you get beyond a fairly low level of complexity, there will be maintainence problems: It will take you too long to get it right, it will be impossible to figure out when something goes wrong, and you'll drive the next poor developer crazy if he doesn't have a complete knowlege of make (which is most of us). Yes, sometimes it may be neccesary to do this if you want to reuse some rules and functions but modify them under different conditions, AND you are restricted to doing it all in the Makefile (rather than preprocessing, calling out to external scripts, etc.)
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.