Re: http/2 & hpack protocol review

On May 5, 2014, at 6:43 PM, Julian Reschke <julian.reschke@gmx.de> wrote:

> On 2014-05-05 17:31, Larry Masinter wrote:
>> Perhaps an update to BCP 56 (akahttp://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc3205.txt  ) “On the use of HTTP as a Substrate” and explicit warnings about the inappropriateness of HTTP/2 for these other applications belongs in the HTTP2 introduction.
>> 
>> Larry
>> ...
> 
> If HTTP/2 is inappropriate for a case where HTTP/1.1, that's a problem we need to solve. This WG is chartered to define a new protocol version that can *replace* HTTP/1.1.

I think HTTP/1.1 is used in many places where it is not the most appropriate protocol, and we don’t have to make HTTP/2 cater to all of them.

> So I'd really like to see something more concrete than "it's too complex". After all, correctly parsing text messages is complex as well, and that part is gone in HTTP/2.

It’s not so much that HTTP/1 is much simpler. It’s that you can use a very simple subset of HTTP/1 - we’ve all talked to a web server by running telnet or “openssl s_client” and just typed in “GET / HTTP/1.0\n\n”. There is no way this easy to get stuff in HTTP/2.

Much of the popularity of passing everything over either HTTP or HTTPS is because of firewalls ([1]). This is getting to be less of a problem as firewalls are replaced by smarter firewalls, but people still prefer to use HTTP(S) because it works pretty much everywhere, which seems kind of wrong from a protocol perspective.

Yoav

[1] http://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-tschofenig-hourglass-00

Received on Monday, 5 May 2014 15:56:01 UTC