Re: SPDY as HTTP replacement?

On Thu, 8 Dec 2011, Mark Nottingham wrote:

> Likewise, Transport Flexibility was a goal of SOAP and friends, but it 
> never really worked out, because (as DaveO loved to point out), the 
> abstractions are leaky, and you can never really hide from the 
> underlying transport's characteristics.

To be fair, it's leaking as well in HTTP/1.1, there are many things that 
are in HTTP because of the use of TCP: pipelining, Keep-Alive for 
example).

The main question is, do you want to add a layer of abstraction or add 
specific glue to enhance the use of a specific transport.

> So, I don't know that I'd take the NG work as a blueprint for work 
> today; it's more of a historical snapshot of thinking at that time -- 
> thinking that we've had a lot of subsequent experience with.
>
> Regards,
>
>
> On 08/12/2011, at 4:56 AM, Larry Masinter wrote:
>
>> 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
>>
>>
>>
>
> --
> Mark Nottingham
> http://www.mnot.net/
>
>
>
>
>

-- 
Baroula que barouleras, au tiéu toujou t'entourneras.

         ~~Yves

Received on Thursday, 8 December 2011 14:31:57 UTC