Re: WG Review: Recharter of Hypertext Transfer Protocol Bis (httpbis)

On 2012-02-26 10:44, Yoav Nir wrote:
> ...
>> Could you please explain why you think tying this effort to HTTP/2.0 is necessary to achieve that? To me that's the critical bit, and I still haven't seen the reasoning (perhaps I missed it).
>
> I think I have *an* answer to this, though probably not *the* answer.
>
> There's two stages to adoption - implementation and roll-out. Obviously you can't roll out "new authentication" before the browsers and servers implement it. For my website, I wouldn't roll out new auth if only one or two of the browsers out there implemented it. Even if all the big ones (IE, Firefox, Chrome, Opera) did, I would still have to provide a backwards compatibility authentication scheme to support older browsers. This would lead to both inconsistent UI and to ugly javascript that detects the browser version, and makes the roll-out slower.

You can send multiple challenges in one response.

We could also define a way to make HTML-form-based login an HTTP scheme 
(see <http://tools.ietf.org/id/draft-broyer-http-cookie-auth-00.txt>) to 
integrate better what people use today.

> If any HTTP/2.0 browser is bound to have "new authentication" it makes things much easier.
>
> This could be circumvented by adding request headers that advertise capabilities, but I don't think we like those much.

I don't believe we need those. If we do, we should retrofit this into 
1.1 as well.

Anyway, I see lots of theoretical discussion about process. What's 
needed is people doing the actual work, both spec-wise and 
implementation-wise. That's the critical problem.

Best regards, Julian

Received on Sunday, 26 February 2012 14:54:56 UTC