"... just to be shouted down for years by people insisting it was going to be epic as the much-smarter people at Google knew what they were doing and really needed this so we should just let them ram it into the spec."
In the past when I have expressed satisfaction over decades in using HTTP/1.1 pipelining for non-graphical web use, e.g., fast, non-interactive information retrieval, instead of HTTP/2 which is slower and poorly suited for the task, I have been downvoted and received snarky replies on HN.
HTTP/2 is a fine example of how this one company acting as one would expect in its own self-interest is continually seeking to exercise control over public access to a public resource (the www). HTTP/2 may as well be "HTTP/Chrome". If someone uses Chrome then they will be attempting to use HTTP/2. The same company controls the gateway to content (search engine), the hardware, the software (browser) and now the network protocol, to mention only a sample of all the pieces they control.
Let's see if this comment draws more downvotes and snark from the HTTP/2 promoters.
I’ll bite. I like HTTP/2. It may be too complicated for what it was designed to do, i.e serving web resources, but it’s really good at doing things that it wasn’t designed to do.
If you need something more complicated than what a browser does with HTTP, with a lot of bidirectional communication, then HTTP/2 makes for a great alternative to WebSockets. HTTP isn’t just used in browsers but also for server-server, mobile-server, IPC, etc. HTTP/1.1 isn’t always good enough for that.
I agree with your sentiment. We were excited by HTTP2 at the time for use in embedded/iot devices (e.g. out of order responses to relax buffering, compression to save bandwidth) until we understood it is close to being unimplementable. To me the realisation hit hard, realizing webtech is all about CDNs and large plattforms being accessed with Chrome not about enabling HATEOAS for everyone.
In the past when I have expressed satisfaction over decades in using HTTP/1.1 pipelining for non-graphical web use, e.g., fast, non-interactive information retrieval, instead of HTTP/2 which is slower and poorly suited for the task, I have been downvoted and received snarky replies on HN.
HTTP/2 is a fine example of how this one company acting as one would expect in its own self-interest is continually seeking to exercise control over public access to a public resource (the www). HTTP/2 may as well be "HTTP/Chrome". If someone uses Chrome then they will be attempting to use HTTP/2. The same company controls the gateway to content (search engine), the hardware, the software (browser) and now the network protocol, to mention only a sample of all the pieces they control.
Let's see if this comment draws more downvotes and snark from the HTTP/2 promoters.