Comment by jlas | Hacker News Reader

Comment by jlas | Hacker News Reader

Not sure what you're ranting about here. What closed protocols / technologies are vendors creating that pose a risk?

On the contrary over the last few years we've seen vendors start to converge on web standards (HTML, CSS, JS) [2].

We've seen the development of crucial technologies for rich multimedia / interactivity on web apps like websockets (RFC 6455 [3]) and WebRTC [4]. Things like an open browser automation protocol is helping devs build cross-browser apps [5].

Also, 1) we're up to RFC 7639 in the official list [1], so that's about 2000 RFCs since the one you mentioned in your article. 2) RSS is not a protocol 3) vendors are building completely open source tools (e.g. Facebook & Google with React & Angular.js) 4) "companies now deliver one half of their application and some custom protocol over HTTP and never mind inter-operability with other services or playing nice", really confused about this, do you have any examples? 5) Are you suggesting that HTTP is transport layer? Because it's not [6]

   [1] http://www.ietf.org/download/rfc-index.txt
   [2] http://caniuse.com/
   [3] https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc6455
   [4] http://www.w3.org/TR/2015/WD-webrtc-20150210/
   [5] http://www.w3.org/TR/webdriver/
   [6] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_protocol_suite

You're missing the point if you're holding up HTML/CSS/JS as a counter-example.

In the past, we had a more robust network software ecosystem in which high-level protocol semantics were standardized across vendors, ensuring that:

- Multiple server implementations existed, and

- Multiple client implementations existed, and

- Data (the bits owned by users) were portable across those implementations.

This creates a healthy, more resilient ecosystem, within which there does not exist a single point of failure, and competition for clients, servers, and services providing the same is robust.

HTML/CSS/JS do standardize semantics, but they're application platform semantics -- we get interoperability and choice across browsers and web servers, but we're losing network interoperability between the applications being built on top of them.

This isn't limited to the web, either: closed protocols and DRM on mobile (e.g. Apple's iMessage, Facetime) have produced a similar result. Apple controls the messaging clients, the OS, the network protocol, and the servers. If you want to leave, you lose access to everyone else using the protocol. Resiliency is also lost -- a single party controls the entire infrastructure, including the client software.

> RSS is not a protocol

I don't agree with this, but I can see reasonable arguments on either side of the argument.

> vendors are building completely open source tools [like] React & Angular.js

It's good that folks are open-sourcing their GUI toolkits. The problem isn't the lack of open-source GUI toolkits. The problem is the lack of interoperability between various Bigcos' services due to the lack of open protocols. Sure, you can reverse engineer the protos, but protocol design and BigCo cantankerousness has come a long way since OSCAR.

> Are you suggesting that HTTP is transport layer? Because it's not

It totally is. It's the Universal Firewall Bypass transport layer. (There are ways to categorize sections of the networking stack that aren't the OSI seven-layer model. :) )

It's also the walled garden aspect. Restrictive APIs [twitter], and blocking 3rd party developer projects [craigslist/padmapper].

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