Re: SPDY as HTTP replacement?

Hi Larry,

I re-read the NG requirements doc the other day:
  http://www.w3.org/Protocols/HTTP-NG/1998/11/draft-frystyk-httpng-overview-00

My sense was that pretty much everything it talks about is either no longer relevant, potentially bad practice, or covered by a proposal like SPDY.

For example, one thing on its wish list is distributed extensibility. After the PEP, SOAP and WS-* experiments, many people are actively wondering whether this is a good idea; Roy called the "must understand" approach to protocol design "socially reprehensible." See <http://www.mnot.net/blog/2006/04/07/extensibility>.

Likewise, Transport Flexibility was a goal of SOAP and friends, but it never really worked out, because (as DaveO loved to point out), the abstractions are leaky, and you can never really hide from the underlying transport's characteristics.

So, I don't know that I'd take the NG work as a blueprint for work today; it's more of a historical snapshot of thinking at that time -- thinking that we've had a lot of subsequent experience with.

Regards,


On 08/12/2011, at 4:56 AM, Larry Masinter wrote:

> This message had the wrong "subject" line, and didn't note that it was also in response to Yves' ACTION-618....
> 
> -----Original Message-----
> From: Larry Masinter [mailto:masinter@adobe.com] 
> Sent: Wednesday, December 07, 2011 9:47 AM
> To: Yves Lafon; Noah Mendelsohn
> Cc: www-tag@w3.org; Amy van der Hiel
> Subject: RE: Agenda for 1 Dec. 2011 TAG call looks thin - call may be cancelled
> 
> I'd like a discussion of HTTP and SPDY if only to review Yves' summary ...
> 
> I remember coming away from the TAG F2F presentation at the F2F with the impression that SPDY was optimized for a relatively narrow set of use cases compared to the full breadth of current HTTP applications,  that SPDY would serve well in those cases (a high-performance 'upgrade' option for those servers that matched the use case for which it was designed), but that SPDY was also far from being a HTTP replacement.  I think if SPDY were *only* useful for the "top 100 sites on the internet", it would be still worth developing and bringing to standard.
> 
> This wasn't based on a technical analysis of SPDY and counter-examples, but rather that (as it seemed in the Q&A session after the presentation) that the analysis and optimization against the HTTP-NG failure cases hadn't really been done. 
> 
> To be clear, I think SPDY could succeed and be an important optimization of the Internet, and I'm all for further development, standardization, analysis and further work, I just don't imagine we are close to calling it HTTP 2.0. 
> 
> Now, maybe this is just my personal recollection? Did I miss something or mis-remember? The minutes of the discussion at the F2F are sparse.
> 
> Also, since a great deal of the HTTP-NG work was done by W3C before the project was abandoned, perhaps there might be some organizational memory that would help.... a review of "why HTTP-NG failed" would be helpful; my memory is a little fuzzy about it, although at the time, I was disappointed that the project was abandoned.
> 
> Larry
> --
> http://larry.masinter.net
> 
> 
> 

--
Mark Nottingham
http://www.mnot.net/

Received on Thursday, 8 December 2011 00:32:23 UTC