- I value software that keeps to the spec, because it's the spec that I (as a dev or non-dev) refer to. You never hear "NodeJS has HTTPish module", nor do you read documentation of that module's concepts and behaviour. Those are defined in the spec, and the __fill_in_with_any_language__ HTTP module just implements those definitions.
- Optimizations, simplifications, corrections should be done in the spec, whenever the you find them at implementation-time.
But until now there has not been ONE HTTP server that grasps and handles the HTTP specs in their whole. So then, I find it hilarious to read that about optimizations when neither of us have the whole picture.
That said, I don't think it's Node.js to blame here (albeit they do have weird views of standards: https://github.com/joyent/node/issues/4850) but HTTP itself because the spec's abstraction levels have been far away from the implementations' reach. HTTPs concepts are gorgeous but they are worth nil if implementation is "hard" and never done properly.
Longer story at: http://andreineculau.github.io/hyperrest/2013-06-10-http-hel...