Jolly we! Few days ago IETF has released the initial draft of HTTP/2.0 specification (http://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-ietf-httpbis-http2-04). It’s just draft and what is more - an initial draft, so hold your horses with heavy development, but it’s possibly to already make yourself some kind of opinion on what’s going to change with the most basic of web protocols.
If you expect more comprehensive analysis, help yourself with the following post: http://apiux.com/2013/07/23/http2-0-initial-draft-released/ I’m just going to point out the most important (in my opinion) points:
- HTTP/2.0 ain’t going to substitute HTTP/1.1 in place. They are supposed to co-exist in parallel (it’d be really hard to imagine something else, tbh).
- HTTP/2.0 is based on SPDY (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SPDY), but as opposed to this one, it will be an open standard.
- The connection lifecycle is going to change, what is supposed to enable some content prioritization (within 1 open connection) and advanced server push technologies (comet-like).
Is it such a big deal? Can we expect web development revolution then? Honestly, I don’t know yet. It sounds really interesting, but:
- there’s already SPDY support in Chromium, FireFox and Opera, but it didn’t rock the word so far
- content prioritization, compression, multiplexing, server push - well, all of that is (to some extent) already available (this way or another, sometimes using workarounds)
Definitely HTTP/2.0 has to got the potential to be a game-changer, but I keep being skeptical for now. Fortunately, sometimes particular technologies sometimes even exceed expectations and visions of their creators :)