Re: Should Web Services be served by a different HTTP n+1?

[Yoav Nir <[e-mail]>]

On Jan 24, 2013, at 9:01 PM, Nico Williams <[e-mail]> wrote:

> On Thu, Jan 24, 2013 at 12:41 PM, William Chan (陈智昌)
> <[e-mail]> wrote:
>>> The main one is that the receiver has to have enough memory to store the
>>> dictionary.
>> 
>> I think this boils down to the argument on the other thread. Do the
>> gains for keeping state outweigh the costs? Note that given Roberto's
>> delta compression proposal, the sender can disable compression
>> entirely, so the receiver does not need to maintain state. Browsers
>> probably would not do this, due to our desire to optimize for web
>> browsing speed. For web services where you control the client, you
>> indeed would be able to disable compression.
> 
> IMO we need stateful compression to be absolutely optional to
> implement.  (If we choose to go with stateful compression in the first
> place.  I think we shouldn't.)

I think we need to do a little more. I think we should define a "minimal implementation" and have a way for client and server to signal this. A minimal implementation would not be able to do any or some of these:
 - compression
 - server-initiated streams
 - stream priority
 - credentials
 - all but a small set of headers.
 - multiple concurrent streams

Maybe we need a CAPABILITIES control frame that will allow client or server to communicate to the other what capabilities they don't have.

A truly minimal client would be capable of one stream at a time - really down to HTTP/1.0 functionality with the new syntax.

Would this allow Phillip to use HTTP/2 for minimalist web services?

Yoav