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PHK: HTTP 2.0 Should Be Scrapped

Posted by Unknown on from the just-give-up dept.

Via the HTTP working group list comes a post from Poul-Henning Kamp proposing that HTTP 2.0 (as it exists now) never be released after the plan of adopting Google's SPDY protocol with minor changes revealed flaws that SPDY/HTTP 2.0 will not address. Quoting: "The WG took the prototype SPDY was, before even completing its previous assignment, and wasted a lot of time and effort trying to goldplate over the warts and mistakes in it. And rather than 'ohh, we get HTTP/2.0 almost for free', we found out that there are numerous hard problems that SPDY doesn't even get close to solving, and that we will need to make some simplifications in the evolved HTTP concept if we ever want to solve them. ... Wouldn't we get a better result from taking a much deeper look at the current cryptographic and privacy situation, rather than publish a protocol with a cryptographic band-aid which doesn't solve the problems and gets in the way in many applications ? ... Isn't publishing HTTP/2.0 as a 'place-holder' is just a waste of everybody's time, and a needless code churn, leading to increased risk of security exposures and failure for no significant gains ?"

4 of 220 comments (clear)

  1. His previous comments are much better by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Interesting

    Why HTTP/2.0 does not seem interesting

  2. Re:Encryption by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Interesting

    No, you really don't. Encryption is good for Facebook, but enforcing it for your Internet-of-Everything lightbulb or temperature probe in the basement gains nothing other than more complex bugs and lower battery life.

  3. Convincing by gweihir · · Score: 5, Interesting

    There is also the other thing that there is no urgent need to replace HTTP/1.1, despite of what people claim. Sure, it has problems, but the applications it does not support so well are things that there is not urgent need for, hence there is no urgent need for a protocol replacement. It would be far better to carefully consider what to put into the successor and what not. And KISS should the the overriding concern, anything else causes a lot more problems and wastes a lot more resources than having the successor a few years later.

    --
    Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
  4. Re:Good point, except... by MassacrE · · Score: 4, Interesting

    It is a technical discussion. Unless you are prepared to provide feedback on how to make a more private/anonymous protocol which can serve as a drop-in replacement for HTTP 1.1, "normal users" will just serve as background noise.

    PHK's biggest issue IMHO is that HTTP/2 will break his software (Varnish), by requiring things his internal architecture can't really deal with (TLS).