title: Can a socket.io server communicate with a non-socket.io client
body: <p>I am building a chat server which uses a custom protocol for communicating with clients over sockets. The client sends specific strings to the server and the server must take an appropriate action based on these non-standard messages. I can't change this protocol, nor do I have any access to the underlying client code.</p>
  
  <p>My question is, can I use the node.js socket.io package to power the server socket communication if I have no idea how the client is handling it's socket activity? I'm asking because, reading through the socket.io docs, each time I push anything through a socket an 'event' is associated with each action.</p>
  
  <p>Is it possible to send a very exact message to the client from the server with this 'event' bundled in? Am I better off using the websockets package?</p>