I just feel like the basic idea of HTTP 2.0 misses the point of a stateless, text-based protocol. Also, muxing, flowcontrol? These are not things application level protocols should be caring about.
The nice thing about this approach is that it is entirely contained such that the web application in the browser doesn't know (or even need to know) the difference, in the same way that current web applications don't need to worry about whether the request data was compressed or not.
However, some things, such as avoiding making multiple connections due to congestion and due to slow-start being slow, flow control, and arguably encryption, seem like they would be better addressed in TCP. And in fact, Google is trying to do that with QUIC.
The problem is that if (when) those things get standardized in HTTP/2.0, they need to be supported forever, even if an improved transport layer protocol makes them obsolete in relatively short order.
It reeks of overengineering--might as well spend that energy improving TCP or putting together a better secure sockets layer.
Most of the problems they cite are the result of people shoving too much shit (ads, trackers, social media, etc.) into their sites anyways.
Flow control is necessary because it's a multiplexed protocol. Without your own flow control commands, flow control is applied over the entire TCP stream, not on your substreams. That doesn't do what you want. Try it: implement any kind of multiplexed protocol yourself, and you will quickly see why it is necessary.
Encryption: some of it might be for security, but a lot of it is also for backward compatibility. SPDY/HTTP2 is a different protocol than HTTP1, and there are a lot of broken routers out there that will break things unless you encrypt the entire connection as an SSL session.
Those who do not understand SPDY are doomed to complain about it on HN, and then one day maybe reinvent it, poorly.
Why should HTTP be a multiplex protocol though; that's the issue.
> Encryption: some of it might be for security, but a lot of it is also for backward compatibility. SPDY/HTTP2 is a different protocol than HTTP1, and there are a lot of broken routers out there that will break things unless you encrypt the entire connection as an SSL session.
So why not just use SSL/TLS? Why wrap it into the HTTP protocol?
> Those who do not understand SPDY are doomed to complain about it on HN, and then one day maybe reinvent it, poorly.
Those who can't see the benefits and reason for HTTP1 are doomed to make a mess of it by "improving" (or "working around") it.
Because HTTP is inefficient due to the TCP three-way handshake, and because pipelining has many problems. These are fixed by multiplexing.
> So why not just use SSL/TLS? Why wrap it into the HTTP protocol?
They are using TLS.
So why should HTTP care about this?
> They are using TLS.
But it's specified as part of the HTTP protocol