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

[Mark Nottingham <[e-mail]>]

In one of our recent meetings, one of the grey-bearded IETF old-timers (I forget which, sorry) said that a textual-protocol was a nice-to-have, but that it shouldn't be a determining factor in design. 

I.e., if you can get everything you need out of a protocol, *and* make it textual, do so, but if it detracts from the value you get from it, don't let that constrain you.

FWIW, I think that's a good rule of thumb. However, this means that the community is going to need *excellent* tooling for analysing, debugging, etc. HTTP traffic; and I don't just mean a Wireshark plugin!

Cheers,


On 21/01/2013, at 9:36 AM, William Chan (陈智昌) <[e-mail]> wrote:

> There are many advantages to using binary data. If you would like a
> textual representation of a protocol, I advise using a utility to
> generate one for you.
> 
> On Sun, Jan 20, 2013 at 2:20 PM, Pablo <[e-mail]> 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).
>> 
>> 
>> [1] I started knowing about HTTP 2.0 here:
>> http://webscannotes.com/2012/10/09/http-2-0-officially-in-the-works/
>> 
> 

--
Mark Nottingham   http://www.mnot.net/