[bhouston]

> HTTP/2 is all 100% mandatory. Any compliant HTTP/2 implementation will support an EXACT set of known features.

But over the next couple of years, won't people come up with new ideas and add them as optional extensions? How is that handled?

I suspect some of these optional extensions will be really useful in special cases such as support for LZMA/LZHAM compression in addition to just gzip.

[TylerE]

There is support for extensions, but they're, well, extensions. The only thing the protocol specifies is that a compliant implementation must pass-through unchanged any block it doesn't understand.

Compare with HTTP/1.1 where for instance the entire content negotiation mechanism is optional and clients need to be able to deal with it not being available.

[josteink]

> There is support for extensions, but they're, well, extensions.

So down the line, it will be pretty much exactly like HTTP 1.0 and 1.1 then.

Good to hear someone thought this thoroughly through before creating a mega-complex protocol unimplementable by most industry-grade engineers, which will also need to be debugged and maintained for all internet-eternity.

[spacecowboy_lon]

Well in that case Apache Ngix Microsoft and the IETF need to keep control of the satndard any one that tries to add the http/2 equivelent of <blink> gets taken out and shot.

I have seen this before with OSI when MCI decided that part of the x.400 standard was optional. And not to mention ICL who thought that starting counting from 0 was a good idea when that standard said MUST START from 1 (and you wonder why the UK doesnt have a mainframe maker any more)