Google's SPDY To Be Incorporated Into HTTP 2.0
Linked by Thom Holwerda on Wed 25th Jan 2012 22:05 UTC, submitted by twitterfire
Internet & Networking "Google's efforts to improve Internet efficiency through the development of the SPDY (pronounced 'speedy') protocol got a major boost today when the chairman of the HTTP Working Group (HTTPbis), Mark Nottingham, called for it to be included in the HTTP 2.0 standard. SPDY is a protocol that's already used to a certain degree online; formal incorporation into the next-generation standard would improve its chances of being generally adopted."
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Neolander
Member since:
2010-03-08

Have you ever written parsers? It is vastly easier to parse binary protocols than text. Even JSON, with a relatively simple grammar, is much harder to parse than BSON, for example.

Just to make it clear : what I meant was not that it is easy to write a text parser, but that thanks to the UNIX world, there are several quality general-purpose text parsing code and algorithms around the web, ready to be tuned for specific uses. I am not sure that the same can be said of binary parsers, where it seems to me that one is more likely to find one parser for each specific protocol/file format.

Endianness is not really an issue, if the protocol simply defines it to be one way or the other. Also, some binary protocols are byte-based, like UTF-8.

It is arguable that UTF-8, like ASCII, is more of the minimal binary support that any text-based protocol needs, though. This protocol is pretty much only good at transmitting text.

Edited 2012-01-27 05:59 UTC

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