Re: Draft finding - "Transitioning the Web to HTTPS"

Noah,

While I agree with you in spirit — we should be building a Web for the long term, and we should allow unintended reuse — this seems like an argument that “we shouldn’t do X because it might reduce utility in undefined, far-future circumstances,” and that’s a VERY high bar to get past. It’s also one that AFAICT we haven’t applied to any other decision made at the W3C.

We discussed this finding at the TAG F2F this week, and I have some editing to do; among that is making it clear that this document is NOT about deprecating or disallowing http:// on the Web, but about making sure that https:// is as easy as possible to use, and that transitioning to it is relatively painless, while assuring that it’s used when appropriate (the so-called “powerful features” discussion). 

Cheers,


> On 9 Jan 2015, at 12:17 pm, Noah Mendelsohn <nrm@arcanedomain.com> wrote:
> 
> I'm struck that much of the discussion is about the Web as it is today in 2015. Just 10 or 15 years ago, the ration of costs of long haul to local networks was such that many organizations (e.g. my employer at the time, IBM) ran proxies near the corporate/public Internet boundary, and perhaps elsewhere internally also. In many parts of the world that cost ratio has changed such that proxies are less important, and we are engaged in a debate as to whether they need no longer be well supported by the Web architecture. Question: what is our level of confidence that in future years technology changes won't alter the cost ratios to make proxies desirable once again?
> 
> Some of the choices we make here affect how things are named, as well as the protocols by which they are accessed. If we recommend that most or all resources be named with https-scheme names, then it becomes much harder to re-enable proxying should that later become desirable.
> 
> Whatever the final answer we choose, I we should remember that changes affecting the naming of resources have effects over decades, not just years. They are in that sense very hard to undo. Overall, we should have high confidence that the choices we make now are good gambles for well into the 21st century, not just for 2015-2020.
> 
> Noah
> 
> 
> 

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

Received on Friday, 9 January 2015 17:51:44 UTC