Re: HTTbis spec size, was: Rechartering HTTPbis

In message <CA+9kkMAj1vnTsxe7OLRVHSMZmDF5F=u1MQ8oniLgd_TppXiQ1g@mail.gmail.com>
, Ted Hardie writes:
>2012/2/5 Henrik Nordstr=F6m <henrik@henriknordstrom.net>:

>So, two of the transports you list above (UDP and DTLS) are unreliable; is
>reliability not a transport property you expect for HTTP message exchanges?
>[...]
>Of course you can build reliability on top of unreliable transports,

Lets try to be a bit more exacting with our vocabulary, shall we ?

TCP is not "reliable" any more than UDP is, many TCP connections
fail, both during establishment and later.

What TCP offers is "we'll hide all the retransmissions and pretend
to be much more reliable than the underlying network" which is often
convenient.

But for many HTTP-purposes, UDP would be good enough:  You send the
request and either you get a reply or you do not.  That isn't very
different from a TCP connection breaking.

Obviously, HTTP over UDP would be very exposed to DoS, so it should
probably be confined to behind firewalls and other walled gardens,
but I can certainly see the utility for a number of cases.

-- 
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Received on Monday, 6 February 2012 19:26:48 UTC