Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by austin-cheney 2 hours ago
It blows my mind that people are invested in this. HTTP is a 35+ year old text-based protocol. Its becoming the COBOL of digital transmission.

Just as one example, among many, you could try WebSockets (or some other similar protocol) and then push anything over it. Your message could be plain text, JSON, binary, whatever. Web Sockets and protobufs are bidirectional (full duplex) too.

3 comments

a 35+ year old text-based protocol with 3 major variants (two of them supporting binary frames), and which is used to communicate most of the internet

yeah, I also don't get the hype, let's go back to everyone declaring their own communication protocol

The internet is complex, and you have tons of protocols that are not well supported. TCP/HTTP are well supported by proxies and have well-defined, stable specs, which also help with caching, throttling, etc.

Just because it's old doesn't mean it is worse than alternatives, most likely it is quite the contrary.

WONIBDFI (whether or not it's broke, don't fix it)