Re: If not JSON, what then ?

[Martin Thomson <[e-mail]>]

On 3 August 2016 at 19:45, Willy Tarreau <[e-mail]> wrote:
> Such bytes are rare and will have a large huffman encoding in H2. Martin's
> suggestion of '><' could be more efficient, though I haven't checked.

I tend to think that we should not let hpack drive this.  We should
maybe avoid Huffman encoding and then throw octets into the value
field.  Starting with a > or : or other octet is still probably useful
and might even be necessary.  In HTTP/1.1 we can use base64(url) as a
reasonable space/speed trade-off, again with the same demarc octet.
But we'd be defining a binary encoding.

Binary avoids the nastiness with character encoding (just use UTF-8),
makes numbers and dates much more numbery, and lets us tailor the
other types to our needs.

I think that PHK is perfectly right in recognizing that we don't have
complex needs.  I actually think that this is good.  Limitations are
empowering.

I said this privately to someone at the workshop, but my realization
was that we currently have schema-aware parsing with extremely limited
points of extension.  A revised system that supports that doesn't need
to be very complex.  Even a single level map of string key to
(optional) string value is more extensibility than we can sensibly
defend.