Re: #385: HTTP2 Upgrade / Negotiation

On Tue, Oct 23, 2012 at 6:23 PM, Amos Jeffries <squid3@treenet.co.nz> wrote:

> [snip]
>
>  montenegro-httpbis-http2-**negotiation seems to provide a reasonable
>> fallback
>> when we're talking primarily about GET/HEAD traffic, but it has obvious
>> issues when dealing with POST/PUT/PATCH type operations. I do not really
>> want to always have to send PUT requests as HTTP/1.1 when what I really
>> want is to use HTTP/2.0 for the entire flow. For payload-bearing requests,
>> upgrade needs to be negotiated before the initial request is sent.
>>
>
> That said, how prevalent is first-contact PUT/POST as opposed to a page
> GET followed by further interaction from scripts and forms?
>  Is it just from badly designed sites using cross-domain PUT/POST?
>  or from non-browser agents which should be able to know better anyway
> with less critical timing requirements?
>
>
Likely significantly more prevalent in the "web applications" space than
within browser-based environments. For instance, POST a new entry to an
Atompub Collection does not first require a GET on the collection URI...

Other examples include...

  - Posting a new tweet (
https://dev.twitter.com/docs/api/1.1/post/statuses/update)
  - Publishing to facebook (
https://developers.facebook.com/docs/reference/api/#publishing)
  - Pushing content notifications (
http://pubsubhubbub.googlecode.com/svn/trunk/pubsubhubbub-core-0.3.html#publishing
)
  - https://developers.google.com/+/history/#writing_moments
  - http://developer.github.com/v3/issues/#create-an-issue
  - ...

While such apis generally can consist of a mixture of GET/POST/PUT/DELETE
operations, these can generally be spread out over separate sessions over
time and first-contact payload-bearing requests are not unusual.

Also consider (while all the cool kids are going to cringe and snicker in
the corner when I mention it...) there is still a significant amount of
WS-* traffic out there to deal with that tunnels all traffic over POST.

- James