[johncolanduoni]

Or maybe, people want to do real-time networking in the browser without having to delve into the mess that is the all-singing, all-dancing WebRTC? Or they want battle tested protocol encryption libraries and flow control in their native app that can do unreliable and out of order delivery?

It’s great fun to write these metaphors about HTTP/N and friends, but the last one improved network performance for mobile devices very substantially while half of HN was jeering at it. There are impractical, camel-like, and downright bizarre IETF standards but these are bad examples.

[skissane]

> There are impractical, camel-like, and downright bizarre IETF standards but these are bad examples

I'd love to know which RFCs you'd call "camel-like"

[johncolanduoni]

I was referring to "a camel is a horse designed by committee" :P

[skissane]

I was asking which IETF standards you would describe by that phrase.

[johncolanduoni]

JWT is probably the one that stands out the most in my mind (I’ll also file it under “bizarre”).

[saurik]

WebRTC does not seem intrinsically more difficult to work with than WebTransport (as someone who works with WebRTC daily at super low levels and also has read about WebTransport and even watched talks about it at the standards committee and is now just annoyed as they didn't even have the decency to replace all of the WebRTC data channel use cases :/). WebRTC is actually a ridiculously easy stack: it is seriously just SCTP over DTLS (with a small bit of ICE, to maintain the connection, that isn't really required anyway). To the extent to which the code sucks--and that's frankly the core problem literally everyone has with it--it can be fixed pretty easily rather than tacking more BS on top, but somehow everyone wants to fix it with new specifications rather than improving the engineering (which I think is related to the problem the other comment brings up); even just some better build engineering would make it easier to compile (which is the #1 reason people seem to hate on WebRTC, not that it is actually *that difficult to compile... but it certainly isn't an invalid complaint).