On Fri, May 10, 2019 at 5:44 PM Nico Williams <nico@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
On Fri, May 10, 2019 at 04:47:34PM -0400, Phillip Hallam-Baker wrote:
> On Thu, May 9, 2019 at 10:00 PM Keith Moore <moore@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
> wrote:
> > p.s. I've often said that "the web" was optimized for deployability.
> > [...]
> >
>
> Damn right it was. Deployability was the primary consideration. We did not
> use SGML because any of us liked it or considered it to be a solid
> technical specification. We hated it and we though it was crap. The reason
> we went there was that we needed buy-in from the publishing world.
>
> But equally importantly, we broke a lot of what people thought were the
> rules. I knew that there wasn't a Content-Length header in MIME when I
> added it to the HTTP spec and so did Tim. But we pretended it did because
> we needed to make the POST method work and we were not going to introduce
> mandatory content body framing or SMTP type escaping.
Thankfully you did add chunked transfer-encoding.
Chunked came after keep alive which I proposed at the first Web Conference together with a different chunking and was told it wasn't needed. Then people started going heavy on images and TCP teardowns started to be the limiting issue.
Is that so? Caching proxies merely need to become MITM proxies. Those
exist, and in many corporate environments that require web access and
data loss protection (DLP), they must exist. I know because I use one,
and also I maintain one (though the one I maintain is not a caching
proxy). Middleboxen will be with us forever.
Of course. The part that is going away though is the part we were focused on in 1994-1996 because the Internet was melting under the load.
MITM proxies introduce their own horrors and they are an example of the cost of trying to remain principled in an unprincipled world. We could do MITM in a much better way than we have ended up with. But we can't come to consensus on a protocol of that sort.
