nitori OP wrote (edited )
Reply to comment by emma in You know you've gone deep into being a reactionary when you find yourself asking why they introduced keepalive to HTTP by nitori
Excellent write-up as always emma :D
I'm not much of a fan of ditching plain text for binary, since it makes debugging more complex (compared to 1.1 where you can just telnet lol), though I do realize that it's necessary if multiplexing is going to be a thing. Idk, is all of this added complexity really worth it just to shave off probably just the same as pipelining would do? In an ideal world where pipelining would only help the websites that really need it even with so many optimizations already applied and considered and where pipelining implementations in servers, clients, and proxies are perfect, I don't think so. But we don't live in that world, and frustratingly I suppose multiplexing is the way to go...
Idk I just wish that for every performance improvement we make, I can just be excited and not think about how webdevs are just going to ruin everything and add so much shit on top of the shit that became a non-factor due to those improvements that the improvements become meaningless again. Instead of "hmm how do we make the web go back to square one >:)" we just go "wow this is amazing we've reached peak I think :D"
Anyway I do wholeheartedly agree that pipelining is fundamentally wrong (even though it does work if it works), it just looks like a silly hack lol.
the server isn't required to support these
Oh, you can write a server that doesn't implement keepalive (while doing everything else 1.1) and still be 1.1-compliant? Well that's neat I suppose!
If virtual hosts didn't exist, I reckon we'd just see as much stuff shoved onto the same host as possible, and more extensive use of the path parameter in cookies to achieve the same stuff we have separate virtual hosts for in this reality.
This might be a cursed opinion but I do actually want all websites to be root/path-agnostic. So if you wanna host Postmill for example but you already have a separate service running in port 80/443, and can't do it in a separate domain (which would require another host in this reality) or port which would have its own root, then I should be able to put it in like /postmill instead.
Like think about it, CDNs like Cloudflare centralizing every damn website like we have right now wouldn't just be feasible without IPv6. Anycast is out of the question and each website under the CDN would require its own IP. The only way for this to go wrong is if every ISP just sold all of their address spaces to the CDNs and NATed the hell out of IPv4 that our own CG-NATs would sweat in fear of what we have created. But that's so ridiculous pessimistic imo that I don't think it will just happen. Well, hopefully.. :P
This exists because some http responses are produced before there's a known content length, thus the content-length header cannot be sent. It wouldn't be necessary if one connection handled a single request, though.
Oh yeah this is actually good lol, silly me :P
Looking into it more it seems like in HTTP/1.0 when there's no Content-Length, the client just assumes the transfer is successfully complete when the connection is closed. Which isn't good because we don't actually know whether the transfer was actually successful or it just got interrupted. 1.1's chonk stuff seems to be for that :D (EDIT: Actually maybe not but still neat regardless)
emma wrote
I'm not much of a fan of ditching plain text for binary, since it makes debugging more complex
I don't think this always holds true, like there was one time at work where an outgoing http request was failing in a strange way, and it took us hours to discover that the environment variable holding the URL in production contained a trailing newline, which the client library didn't pick up on. So this resulted in the following request:
POST /some/shit
HTTP/1.1
X-Some-Header: etc
some payload
If the length of the URL was known ahead of time, as would be typical with a binary protocol, the server would have known the newline was part of it, and handled it accordingly. It wouldn't be friendly as a plain text protocol, but it would make parsing the request very unambiguous and robust.
On the other hand, we see things like http/2 support in curl on Debian 12 being just broken, and the maintainer being too scared to merge the fixes from upstream due to http/2's complexity. So this cuts both ways, I suppose.
Oh, you can write a server that doesn't implement keepalive (while doing everything else 1.1) and still be 1.1-compliant? Well that's neat I suppose!
Yeah, you can just ignore the client's wish for keep-alive and send Connection: close, according to RFC 7230. I imagine this has to be terrible if the client attempts pipelining.
This might be a cursed opinion but I do actually want all websites to be root/path-agnostic. So if you wanna host Postmill for example but you already have a separate service running in port 80/443, and can't do it in a separate domain (which would require another host in this reality) or port which would have its own root, then I should be able to put it in like /postmill instead.
I believe Postmill supports this, but I haven't tested. I think a lot of devs just ignore the possibility you'd want to host something a subpath, unfortunately.
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