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Don't confuse my objections with PHK's objections. There may be good technical answers to his objections; Thomas replied to them above quite cogently, but in any event, PHK's opinion carries a lot more weight than mine. I'm just a spectator.

My objection (observation, really) is that one expects protocol 2.0 to do more than address performance optimization. Simplifying the protocol is a good thing to do with a major revision; they didn't do that. Making the protocol more friendly for upper layer users is another good thing to do with a major revision; they didn't do that either. Instead they took an obviously different protocol designed to address a handful of extremely technical performance matters and rubber-stamped it as HTTP 2.0. Whether you like SPDY or not, it should be clear that this kind of "process" is going to leave people feeling disenfranchised. The spirit of HTTP, inasmuch as such a thing exists, is one of simplicity. SPDY just doesn't "smell" like the successor.

I think the comparison to R6RS is very appropriate to my point. R6RS was designed to address well-known shortcomings of Scheme. The process it took to get approved circumvented a lot of the community. A large segment of the community responded to this by essentially whining about it and ignoring it. We already see the whining about HTTP 2.0. I predict it will be followed by ignoring it, and some years in the future, an HTTP 2.1 or 3.0 that more closely resembles HTTP 1.1.




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