SPDY as HTTP replacement?

This message had the wrong "subject" line, and didn't note that it was also in response to Yves' ACTION-618....

-----Original Message-----
From: Larry Masinter [mailto:masinter@adobe.com] 
Sent: Wednesday, December 07, 2011 9:47 AM
To: Yves Lafon; Noah Mendelsohn
Cc: www-tag@w3.org; Amy van der Hiel
Subject: RE: Agenda for 1 Dec. 2011 TAG call looks thin - call may be cancelled

I'd like a discussion of HTTP and SPDY if only to review Yves' summary ...

I remember coming away from the TAG F2F presentation at the F2F with the impression that SPDY was optimized for a relatively narrow set of use cases compared to the full breadth of current HTTP applications,  that SPDY would serve well in those cases (a high-performance 'upgrade' option for those servers that matched the use case for which it was designed), but that SPDY was also far from being a HTTP replacement.  I think if SPDY were *only* useful for the "top 100 sites on the internet", it would be still worth developing and bringing to standard.

This wasn't based on a technical analysis of SPDY and counter-examples, but rather that (as it seemed in the Q&A session after the presentation) that the analysis and optimization against the HTTP-NG failure cases hadn't really been done. 

To be clear, I think SPDY could succeed and be an important optimization of the Internet, and I'm all for further development, standardization, analysis and further work, I just don't imagine we are close to calling it HTTP 2.0. 

Now, maybe this is just my personal recollection? Did I miss something or mis-remember? The minutes of the discussion at the F2F are sparse.

Also, since a great deal of the HTTP-NG work was done by W3C before the project was abandoned, perhaps there might be some organizational memory that would help.... a review of "why HTTP-NG failed" would be helpful; my memory is a little fuzzy about it, although at the time, I was disappointed that the project was abandoned.

Larry
--
http://larry.masinter.net

Received on Wednesday, 7 December 2011 17:57:16 UTC