On: Strengthening HTTP: A Personal View

[jbb555]

I hate this new HTTP. They seem to have taken a beautifully simple concept and added so much complexity it's ugly and horrible and awful.

[matthewmacleod → jbb555]

I hear this a lot, but without a consistent argument as to why that's the case. Do you have anything more than that to offer?

HTTP 1.1 is relatively simple, but it's also a bottleneck.

[protonfish → matthewmacleod]

Don't shift the burden of proof-It is up to HTTP/2 proponents to demonstrate that the benefits are greater than the costs and from everything I've seen the benefits are meager and the costs are large.

[matthewmacleod → protonfish]

I'm not trying to shift the burden here, but the point made was along the lines of "HTTP2 is rubbish" - I've seen this a lot, with little to back it up.

But I'd say some of the benefits were:

- Server push support - Multiplexed requests/header compression/other performance improvements - Mandatory encryption support

Downsides are (from what I understand):

- Not a plaintext protocol

There may be more downsides, which I'm happy to hear about.

[protonfish → matthewmacleod]

Mandatory encryption support sounds like a good idea, but isn't that what the article was saying they aren't going to do? I would say the other things you mentioned are features, but not necessarily benefits. Server push is not something I want, and if I did, web sockets are probably a better solution. And those alleged performance improvements have yet to show a significant performance increase on real-world web sites.

[jimktrains2 → matthewmacleod]

> - Server push support

Couldn't a multi-part document already do this?

> - Mandatory encryption support

Couldn't they just have said "OK, HTTP 1.2 MUST be done over a TLS connection?" Also, didn't the TLS-always idea go away recently?

The downsides also include reïmplementing much of level 4 (congestion management, flow control, &c) and all of the complexity that goes with it.

[justincormack → matthewmacleod]

Here is a thread about issues in serving it efficiently https://groups.google.com/forum/#!searchin/mechanical-sympat...

[Ono-Sendai → matthewmacleod]

Are you claiming HTTP2 is not more complicated than HTTP 1.1?

[matthewmacleod → Ono-Sendai]

Is is more complex - why is that inherently a bad thing?

[Ono-Sendai → matthewmacleod]

Complexity is bad, all other things being equal, because it takes longer to implement, is more likely to contain bugs, etc..

[matthewmacleod → Ono-Sendai]

Right, but obviously that's not the case here - there are actual benefits of using HTTP2. The fact that it's more complex doesn't necessarily (and I would argue, definitely doesn't) outweigh that.

[jbb555 → matthewmacleod]

I realize I don't have a well argued set of reasons. But sometimes you just look at something and think there has to be a better way than this.