You know, I think this is my real disconnect with HTTP/2.
To me, I see the problems that make HTTP/1 slow, and so I say, "okay let's address those issues." So I'll inline my includes, use spriting if I have a bunch of icons to display, cache things where possible, perform keep alive where I can, drop the use of giant JS libraries, don't use webfonts, use subdomains to avoid cookie pollution, etc. Doesn't take long.
HTTP/2 seems more like, "how can we let people keep their bad practices the same yet try and speed their stuff up a bit?"
And that's fine and I'm okay with the latter existing to make web sites easier and faster. But I don't like the presumption that HTTP/2 is inherently superior to HTTP/1, which is what 99% of these HTTP/2 explanatory articles promote. Complexity adds a dark cost. I think there's a lot of value in someone being able to write a client that can interact with my site in 200 lines of C code with no library dependencies. I feel like we could have put more effort into our libraries and web packages to make HTTP/1 operate much better instead, and kept the wonderful simplicity of HTTP/1.
To me, I see the problems that make HTTP/1 slow, and so I say, "okay let's address those issues." So I'll inline my includes, use spriting if I have a bunch of icons to display, cache things where possible, perform keep alive where I can, drop the use of giant JS libraries, don't use webfonts, use subdomains to avoid cookie pollution, etc. Doesn't take long.
HTTP/2 seems more like, "how can we let people keep their bad practices the same yet try and speed their stuff up a bit?"
And that's fine and I'm okay with the latter existing to make web sites easier and faster. But I don't like the presumption that HTTP/2 is inherently superior to HTTP/1, which is what 99% of these HTTP/2 explanatory articles promote. Complexity adds a dark cost. I think there's a lot of value in someone being able to write a client that can interact with my site in 200 lines of C code with no library dependencies. I feel like we could have put more effort into our libraries and web packages to make HTTP/1 operate much better instead, and kept the wonderful simplicity of HTTP/1.