Keith Devens .com

Entry 1496

Dave Winer: "Until reading this ZDNet article interviewing Don Box, it had not occurred to me that HTTP isn't everything we could want it to be. No sarcasm. People are jumping all over this story, but sheez, he makes some good points."

Good article, and very to the point.

"We have to do something to make it (HTTP) less important," said Box. "If we rely on HTTP we will melt the Internet. We at least have to raise the level of abstraction, so that we have an industry-wide way to do long-running requests--I need a way to send a request to a server and not the get result for five days."
"Another problem with HTTP, said Box, is that it is asymmetric. "Only one entity can initiate an exchange over HTTP, the other entity is passive, and can only respond. For peer-to-peer applications this is not really suitable," he said. The reason that peer-to-peer applications do work today, said Box, is that programmers create hacks to get around the limitations of the protocol, and this is not good. "It's all hackery, it's all ad-hoc and none of it is interoperable," he added.

I especially like this analogy: "Box likes to think of HTTP as the "cockroach of the Internet" because "after the holocaust it will be the only protocol left standing."", as well as his open attitude: ""Microsoft has some ideas (on how to break the independence on HTTP), IBM has some ideas, and others have ideas. We'll see," he said. But, he added, "if one vendor does it on their own, it will simply not be worth the trouble.""

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01:52 (utc-5)