Re: should tools like wget implement HTTP 2.0?

Hi Yoav,

Two things:

1) I think one of the reasons that HTTP has been "wildly popular" is its
simplicity. I think we should only give that up if we have to. At the Hyatt
bar last night I was talking to an IETFer who is focused on DNS but he has
read the HTTP 2 draft and he mentioned that he loves the fact that he can
open a telnet prompt and GET files using simple ASCII HTTP. I wouldn't be
surprised to hear that 100,000 different HTTP client implementations exist.
How many HTTP 2.0 implementations do we expect in 20 years by comparison?

2) HTTP 1.x will outperform HTTP 2.x under some conditions and in some
implementations due to flow control. I'm worried that flow control HTTP 2.0
implementations will vary and I'll start spending a lot of time debugging
HTTP-level flow control in addition to the TCP flow control I already spend
a lot of time puzzling over. In addition, in the single stream case, TCP
can do flow control much better b/c it gets receive window updates with
every ack. Why is HTTP trying to tell the sender how much to send when TCP
often knows much better? Flow control is a very complicated business. I
think HTTP 2.0 should only do it when it must, and when there is a clear
benefit.

Thanks for asking,

Peter


On Sun, Nov 3, 2013 at 1:15 PM, Yoav Nir <ynir@checkpoint.com> wrote:

>
> On Nov 3, 2013, at 11:56 AM, bizzbyster@gmail.com wrote:
>
> > Okay that makes sense.
> >
> > But I do have trouble seeing HTTP2 obsoleting HTTP1.1 since for so many
> purposes it is a step sideways. But let's see how it goes.
>
> Hi, Peter
>
> I understand what you mean by "sideways", but why is that an obstacle for
> HTTP/2 replacing HTTP/1.1 ?
>
> I could argue that the extra stuff in HTTP/1.0 and HTTP/1.1 are also not
> quite needed for WGET, and yet that tools did implement HTTP/1.1.
>
> Is there some use case where HTTP/2 is inferior?  I realize that a minimal
> implementation is more complicated than a minimal implementation of HTTP/1.
> But assuming you have both an HTTP/2 and an HTTP/1 implementation, is there
> a reason to use the HTTP/1 in any case?
>
> Yoav
>
>