While it would be exciting to see something as progressive as SPDY become codified as a standard, keep in mind the deliberately conservative nature of standards development, as seen in the responses to that message:<p><pre><code> On 24/01/2012, at 3:50 PM, James Snell wrote:
> +1... would love to see that work move forward within this group. I do
> have concerns about keeping the scope focused, however. Even tho the
> door would be opened to the possibility of new features being
> introduced, there is obvious danger in opening those doors too wide. I
> strongly feel that things such as the introduction of new request
> methods and new header fields, unless there is clear and irrefutable
> evidence of their general utility within the core of the spec, should
> continue to be pursued as they are today -- within separate I-D's as
> extensions to the core protocol. The charter should make it absolutely
> clear that the goal is an incremental evolution of HTTP/1.1 rather
> than an opportunity for radical changes.
Thanks, James.
Pretty much everyone I've spoken to about this has raised the same concern.
I agree it's going to be a tightrope walk, but I think there's a healthy
amount of concern about this in the community, which will help guide development.
Cheers,
Mark Nottingham</code></pre>
Whilst SPDY is nice, the compression possible using SDCH is a game changer. Given the amount of disk space on machines it should be possible to send quite large dictionaries to browsers.<p>For example, I've been experimenting with the Bentley/McIlroy compression algorithm and I can easily (no effort at all) compress the BBC News web site by 90% (i.e. to 10% of its original size).
I'm looking forward to the inevitable discussions about cross-origin requests, same-origin policy and all that jazz.<p>Having implemented SPDY/2, they could do a lot worse than just ratifying SPDY (v3 by now..) and perhaps clarify some of the CORS stuff.
Why is it that every mailing list I read about updates to legacy design (even classic ones that have been successfully implemented and no one would change back) always that that guy (or guys) who say "no this is stupid, make your own widget if you want new stuff, floppy disks are a good enough standard"? Poul-Henning Kamp is that guy here.<p>The guy who coined the term "bikeshed color" is now arguing over the name of the next iteration of HTTP, and how since it can't be done in a year it shouldn't be done at all. I understand the need for conservatism, but outright pooh-poohing is never effective without <i>major</i> concerns.