
HTTP/2 Approved - EvilPhil
http://www.ietf.org/blog/2015/02/http2-approved/
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wwarren
Not usually one to get behind speculation, but if one were to provide an
educated guess, what does everyone think about the timeline of switchover from
1.1 to 2.0? 1 year? 5 years?

Personally I think we'll see a few big players jump in and then we'll see a
domino effect as all the big servers complete their implementations (Apache,
NGINX, Tomcat etc).

Of course HTTP/1.1 systems are going to be around for a loooong time...

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josteink
> Not usually one to get behind speculation, but if one were to provide an
> educated guess, what does everyone think about the timeline of switchover
> from 1.1 to 2.0? 1 year? 5 years?

Try _never_.

Too much embedded devices out there which 1. won't get updated, 2. doesn't
have enough storage for a crypto-stack and 3. doesn't have the computational
power to process a crypto-stack should it even be updated to have one.

Internet-standards are published, approved and then stays forever. You will
realistically need to support all versions until "the end of time", or at
least the end of the internet as we know it.

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wwarren
Isn't HTTP/2 totally backwards compatible though? So those devices won't ever
need to be updated ... in theory

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vertex-four
No. HTTP/2 is an entirely separate protocol from HTTP/1.1. Any client,
therefore, will have to have both HTTP/1.1 and HTTP/2 protocol stacks.

What HTTP/2 _does_ define is a way for the client to say "I support HTTP/2"
and the server to say "Sure, talk HTTP/2 to me" in a way that allows the
client to fall back to HTTP/1.1 if the server doesn't know about HTTP/2.

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gsnedders
It's not entirely separate, as the abstract of it says: "This specification is
an alternative to, but does not obsolete, the HTTP/1.1 message syntax. HTTP's
existing semantics remain unchanged."

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vertex-four
Indeed, the point of that message is essentially "HTTP/2 is an entirely new
protocol, you can support HTTP/1.1 or HTTP/2 or both, but they have nothing to
do with each other".

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dragonwriter
> but they have nothing to do with each other

The fact that HTTP/2 retains HTTP/1.1's message semantics, as the note points
out, means that they have a _lot_ to do with each other, and that
implementations will be able to share much (probably most) of their core
logic. This is important -- it means that if you implement HTTP/1.1, you've
done a lot of the work of implementing HTTP/2, and vice versa.

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sctb
Previous discussion here:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9066379](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9066379)

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harkyns_castle
Weren't there some nasty DRM things put into HTTP 2.0? That's going back a
while, but I thought there was something nefarious going on.

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dragonwriter
Neither HTTP/2 nor SPDY have ever had any DRM provision.

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harkyns_castle
Good to hear, thanks. I'll dredge up what I was thinking of soon.

