Re: [hybi] BEEP

[Ian Hickson <[e-mail]>]

On Tue, 14 Apr 2009, Greg Wilkins wrote:
> Ian Hickson wrote:
> > On Tue, 14 Apr 2009, Greg Wilkins wrote:
> > > But I think there will only be 1 opportunity this decade to make
> > > significant changes to the firewalls/gateways of the internet.
> > 
> > If significant changes can be made at all, I see no reason to believe there
> > would be a ten year cool-down period between changes. I think this is an
> > artificial concern.
> 
> RFC2616 is dated June 1999 and governs the basic behaviour of firewalls 
> and proxies that are the impediment to any of the protocols we are 
> talking about.
> 
> Even if changes can be made faster than that, we should not be proposing 
> a change to the network infrastructure that is not extensible to a 
> reasonable set of anticipated requirements.
> 
> RFC2616 has lasted a decade because it is flexible and extensible enough 
> to adapt to changing demands.  It's not that other protocols have not 
> been better, it just that HTTP has been good enough to prevent any other 
> protocol establishing dominance.
> 
> This is a good thing and we should strive to emulate it!

There's a big difference between "I don't think we should be making 
changes more than once per decade" and "I don't think it's possible to 
make a change more than once a decade".

I think that "we should not be making changes more than once per decade" 
is a terrible reason to overengineer whatever protocol we come up with. I 
would much rather have incremental updates over a ten year period, leading 
to a massive protocol, than start with a massive protocol and hope we got 
it right without testing it as it is developed.

(I actually think the main reason that nothing has changed in the past 
decade is the same reason that nothing much has changed in HTML, CSS, the 
DOM, etc, in the past ten years. The browser vendors were out to lunch.)

-- 
Ian Hickson               U+1047E                )\._.,--....,'``.    fL
http://ln.hixie.ch/       U+263A                /,   _.. \   _\  ;`._ ,.
Things that are impossible just take longer.   `._.-(,_..'--(,_..'`-.;.'