3 ms·

IETF did a call for proposals, Google had a protocol that was up and running with others using it, MS put in a similar proposal, and another partially formed on

IETF did a call for proposals, Google had a protocol that was up and running with others using it, MS put in a similar proposal, and another partially formed one came along too. SPDY was the only really viable option for the IETF to choose - it was running at scale and there was knowledge out there about deploying it and it's performance. Although SPDY was the prototype, HTTP/2 isn't SPDY anymore it's evolved and moved on taking some of the concepts from SPDY and introducing it's own. Given how long it took HTTP/1.1 to get ratified we suck at ten year standardisation processes.

phkamp 12y ago
SPDY was chosen because nobody got any serious notice or time to come up with any alternatives. If the IETF wanted a fresh look at HTTP, they would not have set such a short deadline for submissions. It was evident from the start that this was about gold-plating & rubber-stamping SPDY, and people saw that and said so, already back then. HTTP/2 isn't compatible with SPDY any more, but there is no significant difference between them, only a few deck-chairs were arranged differently in HTTP/2 The fact that people spend ages chewing the cud on a "clarification" of HTTP/1.1 has no impact on how long time it would take to define a HTTP/2 protocol. Quite the contrary, HTTP/2 was a chance to jettison many of the horrors and mistakes that made the HTTP1.1bis effort so maddening. You can see some of my thinking about what HTTP/2 should have been doing here: http://phk.freebsd.dk/words/httpbis.html http://phk.freebsd.dk/words/httpbis.html
- ldng 12y ago
  Well, with the right kind of advocacy, couldn't the community push for httpbis and push back on http/2 ? True Google control it's servers and Chrome but not Firefox and the rest of the world. Not everybody is going to drink the KoolAid. That would be pushing HTTP/2 to irrelevancy the same way HTML5 (for good or for worse) pushed back on XHTML. Sad way to go but if need be ...

phkamp 12y ago

SPDY was chosen because nobody got any serious notice or time to come up with any alternatives. If the IETF wanted a fresh look at HTTP, they would not have set such a short deadline for submissions. It was evident from the start that this was about gold-plating & rubber-stamping SPDY, and people saw that and said so, already back then. HTTP/2 isn't compatible with SPDY any more, but there is no significant difference between them, only a few deck-chairs were arranged differently in HTTP/2 The fact that people spend ages chewing the cud on a "clarification" of HTTP/1.1 has no impact on how long time it would take to define a HTTP/2 protocol. Quite the contrary, HTTP/2 was a chance to jettison many of the horrors and mistakes that made the HTTP1.1bis effort so maddening. You can see some of my thinking about what HTTP/2 should have been doing here: http://phk.freebsd.dk/words/httpbis.html http://phk.freebsd.dk/words/httpbis.html

ldng 12y ago
Well, with the right kind of advocacy, couldn't the community push for httpbis and push back on http/2 ? True Google control it's servers and Chrome but not Firefox and the rest of the world. Not everybody is going to drink the KoolAid. That would be pushing HTTP/2 to irrelevancy the same way HTML5 (for good or for worse) pushed back on XHTML. Sad way to go but if need be ...