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Comment by hcarvalhoalves | Hacker News Reader

I see the proposals of binary protocols, push content, etc. as symptoms of a deeper issue.

Different than the spirit of HTTP, those protocols have little to do with publishing content anymore. They are just more kludges, in the history of kludges, to patch browsers into application platforms.

That mainly benefits the big web monopolists, who require the browser to be the ultimate application platform, where they can track to their hearts content, display unsolicited advertising, and basically extort business to advertise on their channels to remain relevant on the web. Not quite the idea of "information repository" that spawned the web in the first place.

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Right. Because the alternative, bloated pages out the wazoo makes so much more sense than having smarter Apache and Nginx servers who will do all this for you. Remember, most of the web will be connected by cell phones, we need better protocols for that.

Did you read the comment or just skimmed? I don't question the technical merits, but the underlying motivations, which I believe are fatally flawed.

Read. That's why I mentioned Apache and Nginx, since the Google SPDY team has focused on making sure that there are plugins for each, plus CloudFront support, so that it can be applied "to the little guys". And in turn, I would ask you: Have you not used Web Sockets? How about HTML5 Web Components? New JS functionality? As "hackers", I would expect more excitement than this -- since you're going to enable a whole new generation of low latency cell phone apps, OSes based on web browsers and apps for them (e.g. Win8.1, ChromeOS and Webkit) and do so in a very standards-based way, rather than ad-hoc distributing SPDY through your proprietary browser. Short of security flaws like SSL's header compression, what could go wrong? :)

Perhaps I can reply more clearly after some sleep :) What I meant is that it's to support an evolution of content from static print and "data" to dynamic, interactive and responsive content the likes of which we've never seen before on such a wide scale of platforms and devices. Write once, run anywhere truly exists for content that conforms to web standards, and HTML5 Components will push that boundary even farther. I'll admit, authoring tools and publishing techniques need to play catch up, but that's not a reason to stop progress on standards. That's only a reason to slow or change adoption patterns and usage. Build a better Wordpress, I say, one that's two way. It's not always for the big advertising players, you know...

> That mainly benefits the big web monopolists, who require the browser to be the ultimate application platform, where they can track to their hearts content, display unsolicited advertising

Please. All you need for advertising is plain text, all you need for tracking is cookies.

Read again. I'm not saying the technologies enable advertising. I'm saying it's in their best interest to have people do all useful work inside a browser, with a technology stack they control, increasing ad impressions and being able to provide ubiquitous user behavior tracking. This is the holy grail of advertising and would strengthen their monopoly even more.

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