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Comment by antirez | Hacker News Reader

Congrats to Google for ruining the internet standards in an official way, without strong proofs of big significant improvements over the simpler past protocol.

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Don't confuse the cart and the horse. The IETF standardization process has never been less relevant than it is today. The reality of deployment of a "next-generation HTTP" involves two things, neither of which the IETF has any say in: (a) whether anyone can improve HTTP as it runs between a mainstream browser (or some as-yet unforeseen browser replacement) and a content serving backend in a way meaningful enough to drive adoption, and (b) buy-in from the major browser owners.

That's the way it's supposed to work; the horse is meant to drag the cart. The RFC database is littered with cart-led insurgencies that went nowhere. If binary HTTP is one of those, it'll join them as a historical curiosity.

My fear is that now that Google controls a significant part of HTTP traffic, plus the client side of the story (Chrome + Android), it is in a condition to force things in one way or the other...

I suppose that's a valid concern, but note that Google's control over the protocol was already pretty strong by dint of running Google.

Do you think Google is now in a better position to force things in one way or another than Microsoft was in the 90s?

It's in a similar position. And see how that ended up with Microsoft — we're still suffering the consequences.

You mean like how virtually all of consumer software development now happens either on the web or on a platform that didn't exist until 2007?

I'm actually kind of OK with XMLHttpRequest.

I am quite sure Microsoft views it as huge mistake on their part. :)

Could you elaborate on the part of no strong proofs? I was under impression that SPDY fixes lot of flaws with HTTP/1.{0,1}

I think it's Google interests to make a simple and faster protocol.

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