[jomohke]

I don't think the complexity would be worth it in most cases.

The article is misleading on this, but those HTTP/1.1 best practices aren't slower when served over HTTP2. HTTP2 will still be faster than HTTP/1.1.

- Spriting and concatenation will not be worse under HTTP/2, just (mostly) unnecessary.

- Splitting content across multiple domains will be 'harmful', in that you're enduring multiple TCP handshakes instead of one. But this is no worse than HTTP/1.1

- Minification is unchanged. It will still decrease the download size. Although I sometimes find that the difference after compression is trivial on many modern sites, so is often not worth the decrease in readability/debuggability.

[geofft]

Sure, but as long as I'm supporting a good chunk of HTTP/1.1 users, then I don't get the benefits of the HTTP/2 architecture, right?

I could buy that what I should do is wait a few years, until the majority of my users are HTTP/2 instead of HTTP/1.1, and then optimize everything for HTTP/2 and still work (slowly) on HTTP/1.1. But at the moment it's not clear why I should care: my options seem to be really fast on HTTP/2 and really slow on HTTP/1.1, or kinda fast on HTTP/2 and kinda fast on HTTP/1.1.

[jomohke]

You'll still see performance benefits of HTTP2 while supporting HTTP/1.1 content.

HTTP2 requests have (sometimes significantly[1]) less overhead, and most sites following good HTTP/1.1 practices still make many requests.

Open the network panel in your browser and view a few large sites. Despite minimizing requests with sprites, concatenation etc, most still make dozens of requests, with some large sites pushing over a hundred.

(for example, I just loaded a page for a single tweet on Twitter and it involved twenty requests, with a size over 2MB.)

I think your list of options are incorrect:

- You can optimize for HTTP/1.1 and it will be fast over both protocols.

- Or don't optimize, and it will be fast over HTTP2 and slow over HTTP/1.1. The main benefit is saving development time & complexity. This will not be a worthy tradeoff until HTTP2 is more widespread among your users.

[1] The reduction in latency can be massive, for instance, as the HTTP2 server can push resources immediately without waiting for the browser to request them.

[geofft]

Sure, there's still an advantage for the user to upgrade to HTTP/2. But it sounds like I shouldn't be particularly optimizing for HTTP/2 quite yet? That's what I'm interested in: I'm not usually a web developer so I don't pay close attention, but I'd like to know how to design websites that aren't bad in general.

It sounds like I'm currently best off designing for HTTP/1.1 (with all the usual hacks) and knowing that HTTP/2 will perhaps make things better, instead of designing in any way for HTTP/2, which will make things worse for HTTP/1.1. That seems to be not what this article is saying.

Should I be caring about designing for HTTP/2 yet, or should I just ignore it for a few years?