A hugely bloated, binary protocol is better than the simple, text-based on we have today? I greatly disagree. HTTP/1.1 could use an update, but HTTP/2 was not the answer.
Particularly, HTTP's text format, is a mess. You can continue headers from one line to another. You can embed comments into header values. Seriously. Comments. In a protocol's messages. It's moronic and indefensible. Why anyone would prefer that is probably them thinking that text equals easy to implement or something like that.
Also, how is HTTP/2 more bloated than HTTP/1.1? It simply adds a little framing; most of the bloat of HTTP/1.1 is retained. And as others have pointed out, HTTP/1.1 is hardly 'simple'.
Somebody on the IETF HTTP WG mailing list (may have been PHK himself) pointed out that their server (Varnish?) spends something like 30% of its CPU time parsing/processing just the Date header because it's in plain text. Plain text is not a panacea. We have nice tools like Wireshark these days which make it much easier for humans to read both binary and plain text protocols.
Functionally what's the difference? If I'm unable to read the entire message without a decoder, does it matter if I can read part of it?
> It simply adds a little framing;
I think yo forgot the whole reïnventing Layer-4 in Layer-7 thing. That is a travesty -- adding tons of complexity to solve a problem that it shouldn't be solving.
> We have nice tools like Wireshark these days which make it much easier for humans to read both binary and plain text protocols.
And the more tools _required_ to debug a problem, the harder it becomes to debug.
> spends something like 30% of its CPU time parsing/processing just the Date header because it's in plain text.
Plain-text is not a panacea, however I believe it preferable to a binary protocol for ease of debugging and hackability. If there are issues like the HTTP Date is causing trouble for many people, maybe we should look into how that could be made easier? A better format? Does the Date header even need to exist? (I actually don't think it does, along with Server, UA, and a couple others).
Additionally, I really wish that HTTP/2 would have actually attempted to solve problems faced by smaller HTTP users, and not force a behemoth of complexity (remember Layer 4 in Layer 7) on users who do not want that. I outline what I was hoping to be solved at https://github.com/jimktrains/http_ng.
