[vaxdigitalnh]

I'd like to be able to use pipelining without having to de-chunk. That is, thanks to the the HTTP/1.1 protocol I have never found a server that accepts pipelined requests and delivers unchunked output. Is there a reason they must be linked together? Maybe you could compare this to how SPDY requires header compression; you can't get the other features without accepting the compression feature... the single feature which was the source of the security problems.

In sum, why can't we uncouple features that each may have merit on their own?

[patrickmcmanus]

Optional features tend to be broken in practice. So HTTP/2 is trying to have far fewer of them so that implementations will be more robust.

Chunked requests and pipelines are good examples. They are rarely used but absolutely supported by the spec. But because they are rarely used they break a lot in practice and are not realistically deployable on Internet scale.