Life beyond HTTP 1.1: Google’s SPDY
Nice, but a bit worrysome. Is such binary protocol a Good Thing?<p>Ancient people — even though they hadn't much CPU, memory and network resources — in all their wisdom made high-level protocols text-oriented. Sure, they didn't consider everything (so we're still haunted with evil spirits of, for example, UTF-7 and quoted-printable), but overall design was simple yet perfectly functional. And anyone could use just a telnet client to talk to HTTP (FTP, SMTP, etc) server. With SPDY you can't do such thing anymore, you need specialized software.<p>I'm all for something like "Upgrade: SPDY"/"HTTP/1.1 101 Switching Protocols" (then binary framed message-oriented protocol goes into effect), but I somehow worried with binary-from-the-beginnig "HTTP 2.0". Maybe I'm just too conservative?<p>(Side question: If we want multiplexing streams so badly, why noone cares about SCTP? Is it flawed or inappropriate?)