[rektide]

To me, the jury is very much still out on push. It's entirely in-determinate how useful it is, because only a handful of people have stepped up to try. There is a lot of trickery to getting the server to determine what resources to push, that it knows the client needs, but basics like "let's look at the main pages etag to figure it out" got very little experimentation & tries, certainly very few documented.

> Chrome currently supports handling push streams over HTTP/2 and gQUIC, and this intent is about removing support over both protocols. Chrome does not support push over HTTP/3 and adding support is not on the roadmap.

I am shocked & terrified that google would consider not supporting a sizable chunk of HTTP in their user-agent. I understand that uptake has been slow. That this is not popular. But I do not see support as optional. This practice, of picking & choosing what to implement of our core standards, of deciding to drop core features that were by concensus agreed upon- because 5 years have passed & we're not sure yet how to use it well yet- is something I bow my head to & just hope, hope we can keep on through.

[jsnell]

> But I do not see support as optional.

That's funny, given the HTTP/2 RFC does see the support as optional.

[rektide]

Damn james, killing me.

Philosophically, I am highly opposed to the browser opting not do support this.

Webdevs have been waiting for half a decade for some way to use PUSH in a reactive manner, as I linked further in this thread,

And instead we get this absolute unit of a response.

This is just absolutely hogwash james. I can not. Truly epic tragedy that they would do this to the web, to promising technology, after so so so little time to try to work things out, after so little support from the browser to try to make this useful.

You're not wrong but I am super disappointed to see such a lukewarm take from someone I respect & expect a far more decent viewpoint from.

[torgard]

I think you're mistaking that person for someone else

[rektide]

Yeah I was mistaking him for James Snell, author of HTTP2 (and PUSH) in Node.js. :)

[toast0]

Is there an example of http/2 push being used usefully? I haven't seen one, but would be happy to take a look.

If it's not useful, why keep support for it?

As I recall, Google added this push in spdy, so it makes sense for them to be the ones to push for it to be removed.

[francislavoie]

Think of a framework like Laravel; you can make the Laravel app write "Link" headers for each of the JS or CSS assets declared in its views being rendered. Then, a server, say Caddy which supports push out of the box https://caddyserver.com/docs/caddyfile/directives/push will read the Link headers from the response from PHP, and push them on its behalf. Super simple to implement.

Adoption has been low because there hasn't been enough time for people to get comfortable with and switch to more modern web servers that support this type of thing, and most frameworks haven't figured out that having these sorts of features on by default could have major benefits. But it could happen.

[rektide]

It's good enough for the Web Push Protocol[1], which underpins all the notification systems on the web. This is literally how every notification message that you do not ever accept in to your browser gets delivered.

This also highlights the core missing WTF, which is that the server can PUSH a resource, but there is no way for the client page to tell. 5 years latter, we've talked & talked & talked about it[2], but no one has done a damned fucking thing. Useless fucking awful biased development. PUSH gets to be used by the high & mighty. But it's useless to regular web operators, because no one cares about making the feature usable.

Now that the fuckwads can declare it's not useful, they're deleteing it. From the regular web. But not from Web Push Notifications. Which will keep using PUSH. In a way that websites have never been afforded.

You'd think that if a resource got pushed, we could react to it. These !@#$@#$ have not allowed that to happen. They have denial of serviced the web, made this feature inflexible. Sad. So Sad.

Even without the reacting to push, it seems obvious that there's just more work to do. That we haven't made progress in 3 years just seems like infantile terrible perception of time, of what the adoption curve looks like. A decade for critical serious change to start to take root is fine. The expectation for progress & adoption is way out of whack.

So so sad. Everything is so wrong. You can't just unship the web like this. You need to support the HTTP features we agreed we wanted to create. None of this is happening. I hate what has happened to PUSH so bad. This is so critically terribly mismanaged, the browsers standards groups have fucked this up so so so bad, done so little, had such attrocious mismanagement of what the IETF wanted to do. It's embarassing. We are terrible, we have screwed the pooch so bad on this so many times, & pulling the plug is a colossal fuck up of unbelievable proportions, fucking up a very basic promise that we ought have made for the web, the ability to push things, that never got delivered in to any useful ability on the web to do anything about it. Fuck up, 1000000x fuck up, just fucking shit balls terrible work everyone.

This one issue causes severe doubt in humanity for me. This is a fucked up terrible thing for all humanity, for the web. I can't believe we were so terrible at this.

[1] https://developers.google.com/web/fundamentals/push-notifica...

[2] https://github.com/whatwg/fetch/issues/65

[inimino]

Who is "we" here? Have you worked on a browser?