What's one basic, practical problem with an Internet of Things?

It's not an Internet if its protocols are proprietary. And things, to be inter-netted, require bi-directional communication.

But Websockets enables bi-directional communication and is part of the W3C-produced HTML5 protocol.

So why not let microcontrollers talk to the Internet via Websockets?

Simple idea. Now here's a real-world demo from mbed sending data via Websockets in JSON format. An HTML5 Canvas element can then easily read and display the data in any modern browser.

Check out a 2.6-minute video overview:

This example uses an mbed microcontroller and an mbed server, so the C/C++ code obviously won't run unless you own their particular commercial device. And you might want to look at mbed's websockets server (written in Java) to peer a little more into how the system actually works.

But you get the idea, and it's a cool one.