Re: The use of binary data in any part of HTTP 2.0 is not good

[Willy Tarreau <[e-mail]>]

Hi Pablo,

On Sun, Jan 20, 2013 at 07:20:25PM -0300, Pablo wrote:
> Hello,
> 
>    I have readed this document
> http://dev.chromium.org/spdy/spdy-protocol/spdy-protocol-draft1 today [1].
> 
> I just wanted to say that I think that the use of any binary data (framing,
> header compression, etc.) in any place of the "header" part of HTTP
> protocol is not good; so, please only use plaintext for HTTP 2.0 because,
> otherwise, that will make very difficult to "see" the headers's protocol :)
> 
> Thats all,
> Thanks for reading this few lines, sorry for my basic English, and I hope
> that you can re-think all this of using binary data in any part of HTTP X.X
> (ej: session layer).

As much as I love to read HTTP protocol in network traces or in programs,
I must say that we (humans) are very rare HTTP readers. I suspect that only
something like 1 request on 1 billion is read by a human. This is not a great
enough ratio for keeping an ambiguous, complex, and sometimes even insecure
protocol to parse.

I too tried as much as I could to see what would be achievable with a text
based protocol, but I finally admitted it was a dead end. At the moment the
challenges consist in feeding requests as fast as possible over high latency
connections and processing them as fast as possible on load balancers and
caches in order to maintain a scalable internet. Humans are very incapable
devices there.

Regards,
Willy