What's stopping HTTP/1 from having its headers compressed like in HTTP/2?

Submitted by nitori in technology (edited )

Ignoring the security implications (CRIME, BREACH) for a moment, why didn't we create a new HTTP/1 version like HTTP/1.2 and add some headers (which will only be the ones that cannot be compressed) for header negotiation like Header-Encoding, Accept-Header-Encoding, and Encoded-Headers? We already knew before SPDY that headers will get more and more redundant, so it's kinda weird we didn't iterate HTTP/1 further.

The binary format of HTTP/2 doesn't seem to be a prerequisite for this either AFAICS

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nitori OP wrote

Actually perhaps we might not need compression for the response headers even, but some sort of ETag.. There'd be like a Headers-ETag for the unique value and Headers-ETag-Names (I'm not satisfied with this name but can't think of something better) for the list of redundant headers to not be repeated in subsequent requests

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