Comment by mmstick | Hacker News Reader

Comment by mmstick | Hacker News Reader

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> You've already positioned yourself as trying to take a principled stand against software that doesn't support Brotli in the hopes of convincing the software authors to add support for Brotli. Now you're saying you don't care whether software you don't use supports Brotli. These two positions contradict each other, and if you really don't care about software you don't use, then why are you so dead set against serving up uncompressed content to that software?

I'm not sure where you think the contradiction is. That I do not support web browsers that don't support Brotli should already tell you that I don't care if they support Brotli or not! If there is no support, there is no support! Doesn't effect me.

> You completely missed the point. I know your site doesn't support HTTP. But HTTPS is generally understood to be part of the umbrella of "HTTP". It is in fact literally the same protocol (well, for HTTP/1.1; HTTP/2 is a brand new protocol and irrelevant for this discussion), just wrapped in SSL.

Basically completely irrelevant to what's being discussed here. I do not support non-SSL HTTP connections. That is all!

> Just so we're clear, your site currently does not work, and will continue to not work, with tools like `curl` or `wget`, or nearly all other non-browser tools people have written.

Naturally. I would prefer to not have anyone using these tools on my server.

> That I do not support web browsers that don't support Brotli should already tell you that I don't care if they support Brotli or not! If there is no support, there is no support! Doesn't effect me.

You had to go out of your way to break support for these browsers. Literally every HTTP package (including Rocket) out of the box handles uncompressed responses. You had to modify it to add always-on Brotli encoding.

> I do not support non-SSL HTTP connections.

Why do you keep repeating this? That's completely irrelevant to the discussion at hand. Nothing about this discussion has anything to do with whether or not the HTTP protocol is wrapped in SSL.

> Naturally. I would prefer to not have anyone using these tools on my server.

So, you want a web site that completely breaks HTTP such that only works with a handful of browsers and doesn't work with the probably tens or hundreds of thousands of pieces of other software that speaks HTTP.

Why?

> You had to go out of your way to break support for these browsers. Literally every HTTP package (including Rocket) out of the box handles uncompressed files. You had to modify it to add always-on Brotli encoding.

I did not have to go out of my way to 'break support for these browsers'. All I did was replace the gzip-compression code in my page cacher with brotli-compression code. In other words, I went from always-on Gzip encoding to always-on Brotli encoding! I have never supported serving uncompressed files! The web browsers I care about (Firefox, Chrome) support Brotli, and that's all I care about! There is no purposeful breaking of web browsers. That's just persecution complex talk.

> Why do you keep repeating this? That's completely irrelevant to the discussion at hand. Nothing about this discussion has anything to do with whether or not the HTTP protocol is wrapped in SSL.

You're the one that keeps bringing up that the only difference between HTTP and HTTPS is that HTTPS is HTTPS with SSL. I am merely responding to your comment that your comment about them doesn't matter! What does matter is that my website only supports the HTTPS protocol, not HTTP. The web server only listens on port 443 with TLS enabled.

> So, you want a web site that completely breaks HTTP such that only works with a handful of browsers and doesn't work with the probably tens or hundreds of thousands of pieces of other software that speaks HTTP.

This is nothing more than pure trolling. All major web browsers support Brotli over HTTPS. Apple's WebKit is the only man out, and they are, at best, a minority on the web. Firefox supports it, Chrome supports it, and Edge supports it. Even if Edge didn't support it, the fact that Firefox and Chrome support it is more than enough for me. Other browsers are just bonuses.

Furthermore, yet again, I do not have a HTTP server, so there is no HTTP here to break! HTTPS is implemented to spec, HSTS headers and all! My website is meant to be viewed by people, not machines. In addition, as the web is moving to being HTTPS-exclusive, it's about time that you start getting used to it. You're wasting your time.

Always-on gzip encoding is also technically broken, it's just far more likely to be supported out of the box by other HTTP clients.

> What does matter is that my website only supports the HTTPS protocol

No, that has literally no bearing on this discussion about your use of Brotli encoding. You're weirdly fixated with this, but it's completely irrelevant.

> This is nothing more than pure trolling.

Do you normally go out of your way to insult people who are trying to have a discussion with you? Because that's what calling someone a troll is.

> All major web browsers support Brotli over HTTPS

Why doesn't Safari count in your eyes as a major browser? Or perhaps more interestingly, why doesn't iOS Safari count? Are you really ok with your site not working for 100% of iOS users?

> In addition, as the web is moving to being HTTPS-exclusive, it's about time that you start getting used to it. You're wasting your time.

Why do I have to keep repeating this? HTTPS has literally nothing to do with this discussion. You keep bringing it up over and over again as if it's somehow meaningful, but all it tells me is that you literally have no idea what you're talking about.

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