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It blows my mind that people are invested in this. HTTP is a 35+ year old text-based protocol. Its becoming the COBOL of digital transmission. Just as one ex

It blows my mind that people are invested in this. HTTP is a 35+ year old text-based protocol. Its becoming the COBOL of digital transmission. Just as one example, among many, you could try WebSockets (or some other similar protocol) and then push anything over it. Your message could be plain text, JSON, binary, whatever. Web Sockets and protobufs are bidirectional (full duplex) too.

mekdoonggi 4mo ago
WONIBDFI (whether or not it's broke, don't fix it)
lightningspirit 4mo ago
The internet is complex, and you have tons of protocols that are not well supported. TCP/HTTP are well supported by proxies and have well-defined, stable specs, which also help with caching, throttling, etc. Just because it's old doesn't mean it is worse than alternatives, most likely it is quite the contrary.
- austin-cheney 4mo ago
  Its worse than alternatives because it imposes greater complexity on everybody that uses it. COBOL is also old. That also does not mean COBOL is bad, but nobody wants to write COBOL any more when there are so many better options available.
  - lightningspirit 4mo ago
    I think we're comparing two very different categories. COBOL is an application language, whereas TCP and HTTP are foundational infrastructure. Replacing a language is challenging, but replacing the infrastructure that underpins most of the Internet is orders of magnitude more complex due to the sheer number of interoperating systems. HTTP accounts for roughly 70-80% of global web traffic, and if you narrow it to TCP-based application traffic, its dominance is closer to 95%. Comparing HTTP to COBOL is a bit like comparing trucks to bicycles...
lmariscal 4mo ago
a 35+ year old text-based protocol with 3 major variants (two of them supporting binary frames), and which is used to communicate most of the internet yeah, I also don't get the hype, let's go back to everyone declaring their own communication protocol
- austin-cheney 4mo ago
  Its like saying nobody should bother with IPv6 when IPv4 is more common when the real reason is because people don't want to migrate.

mekdoonggi 4mo ago

WONIBDFI (whether or not it's broke, don't fix it)

lightningspirit 4mo ago

The internet is complex, and you have tons of protocols that are not well supported. TCP/HTTP are well supported by proxies and have well-defined, stable specs, which also help with caching, throttling, etc. Just because it's old doesn't mean it is worse than alternatives, most likely it is quite the contrary.

austin-cheney 4mo ago
Its worse than alternatives because it imposes greater complexity on everybody that uses it. COBOL is also old. That also does not mean COBOL is bad, but nobody wants to write COBOL any more when there are so many better options available.
- lightningspirit 4mo ago
  I think we're comparing two very different categories. COBOL is an application language, whereas TCP and HTTP are foundational infrastructure. Replacing a language is challenging, but replacing the infrastructure that underpins most of the Internet is orders of magnitude more complex due to the sheer number of interoperating systems. HTTP accounts for roughly 70-80% of global web traffic, and if you narrow it to TCP-based application traffic, its dominance is closer to 95%. Comparing HTTP to COBOL is a bit like comparing trucks to bicycles...

lmariscal 4mo ago

a 35+ year old text-based protocol with 3 major variants (two of them supporting binary frames), and which is used to communicate most of the internet yeah, I also don't get the hype, let's go back to everyone declaring their own communication protocol

austin-cheney 4mo ago
Its like saying nobody should bother with IPv6 when IPv4 is more common when the real reason is because people don't want to migrate.