Re: multiplexing -- don't do it

On Mon, Apr 2, 2012 at 11:57 AM, Mark Nottingham <mnot@mnot.net> wrote:

>
> On 31/03/2012, at 1:17 PM, Adam Barth wrote:
>
> > On Sat, Mar 31, 2012 at 4:54 AM, Mark Nottingham <mnot@mnot.net> wrote:
> >>
> >> On 31/03/2012, at 1:11 PM, Mike Belshe wrote:
> >>
> >>> For the record - nobody wants to avoid using port 80 for new
> protocols.  I'd love to!  There is no religious reason that we don't - its
> just that we know, for a fact, that we can't do it without subjecting a
> non-trivial number of users to hangs, data corruption, and other errors.
>  You might think its ok for someone else's browser to throw reliability out
> the window, but nobody at Microsoft, Google, or Mozilla has been willing to
> do that…
> >>
> >> Mike -
> >>
> >> I don't disagree on any specific point (as I think you know), but I
> would observe that the errors you're talking about can themselves be viewed
> as transient. I.e., just because they occur in experiments now, doesn't
> necessarily mean that they won't be fixed in the infrastructure in the
> future -- especially if they generate a lot of support calls, because they
> break a lot MORE things than they do now.
> >>
> >> Yes, there will be a period of pain, but I just wanted to highlight one
> of the potential differences between deploying a standard and a
> single-vendor effort.  It's true that we can't go too far here; if we
> specify a protocol that breaks horribly 50% of the time, it won't get
> traction. However, if we have a good base population and perhaps a good
> fallback story, we *can* change things.
> >
> > That's not our experience as browser vendors.  If browsers offer an
> > HTTP/2.0 that has a bad user experience for 10% of users, then major
> > sites (e.g., Twitter) won't adopt it.  They don't want to punish their
> > users any more than we do.
>
> I didn't say bad experience -- we're not talking about breaking Web sites
> here. If there isn't a good fallback story (as I mentioned), yes, it's
> obviously a non-starter.
>

I think you guys are saying the same thing...  when these errors occur, the
browser incurs a hang or undetected content corruption.  That gets
manifested to the user in a way for which there is either no fallback
(corruption undetected) or for which there is a horrible hang and the
fallback occurs 30+ seconds later...

I'm betting we all agree these are both unacceptable.

Mike




>
> Cheers,
>
> --
> Mark Nottingham
> http://www.mnot.net/
>
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