Re: Mnot's Pub/Sub for the Web

Hi all,

On Wed, 23 Feb 2022 at 10:06, Seph Gentle <me@josephg.com> wrote:
>
> I'd be happy for it to be a GET query with options or something, but however we do it I think it would be much *cleaner* implemented as part of HTTP.

Do you mean HTTP the semantic layer, or HTTP the transport layer? I
assume you mean the former since you're talking about verbs and nouns.
For the latter there are probably lessons to be gleaned from HTTP/2
server push, especially its evolution during specification from a
general-purpose reverse data flow to a specific cache priming/busting
tool (to something nobody implemented).

> I want it to be understandable by caches and middle boxes, rather than something sitting on top of HTTP in an idiosyncratic way.

My concern is that those caches and middle boxes are the very reason
it's hard to implement anything new at the HTTP layer (either one).
Some of those boxes are ossified around HTTP/1.0 and will never
update; many probably implement an approximation of /1.1, but any
message that isn't the exact flavour of /1.1 they've been coded to
handle will make them explode. To the point that they don't read the
version number, or sometimes even the entire method, in the request
line.

Maybe there's a space to design something as an extension to HTTP/2
and /3, since those intentionally don't route through legacy
middleware, but then there's a fork of the HTTP semantic layer
(version 1, and version 2+) which we've kind of avoided up until now.
(Aside: changing from single-request uber-concatenation in H1 to
persistent connections with many tiny blobs in H2 could have lead to a
semantic shift, but it's hard to see if that's actually happening.)

As always on the Internet, a layer has ossified so it's time to build
upwards. As messy as that is. (something something H3 over UDP instead
of IP..)

Cheers
-- 
  Matthew Kerwin
  https://matthew.kerwin.net.au/

Received on Wednesday, 23 February 2022 01:10:42 UTC