Re: multiplexing -- don't do it

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.

Cheers,

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

Received on Monday, 2 April 2012 18:57:42 UTC