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by josteink 3619 days ago
This speed advantage could have been present for plain HTTP as well, if not someone with an agenda had declined to make plain HTTP supported in HTTP/2.

Actually the whole HTTP/2 name is massive misnomer (since it doesn't actually support HTTP) and is the closest thing I can think of as technical newspeak as far as internet protocols are concerned.

Marketing this as a new HTTP protocol version when it clearly wasn't was just shady tactics and bad propaganda. The whole thing stinks.

2 comments

« if not someone with an agenda had declined »

Because privacy and security by default are a bad agenda to agree to?

« the whole HTTP/2 name is massive misnomer (since it doesn't actually support HTTP) »

HTTP/2 is backwards compatible. It may not be your idea of the right direction for HTTP/1.x, but that doesn't make it a misnomer. To be honest, the only people that can decide if it was the right name for it are the IETF and they already made that decision. There's a reason that the name SPDY looked nothing like HTTP, because Google left that decision to the IETF as the standards body controlling the fate of the HTTP protocol.

> Because privacy and security by default are a bad agenda to agree to?

Taking away people's ability to host servers and services for themselves without having to register with a DNS provider and a CA are two major privacy violations, and a roadblock to easy application deployment of applications on your own LAN.

So yes, it's a bad agenda. Because it's not "by default". It's the only choice. You can't choose not to incriminate yourself and your identity to a centralised internet registry if want to host a service now.

You may not realise it, but once again you as a representative of the http/2 crowd is using wildly misleading language.

The so-called "agenda" is avoiding breakage, because tons of middleboxes wouldn't be able to cope with non-TLS HTTP/2. They just assume HTTP/1.1 and things fail when that's not the case. And then there are the security and privacy advantages on top.