From the article:

At a meeting of the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) here yesterday, the working group overseeing HTTP formally opened a dicussion about how to make the technology faster. That discussion included presentations about four specific proposals for HTTP 2.0, including SPDY, developed at Google and already used in the real world, and HTTP Speed+Mobility, developed at Microsoft and revealed Wednesday.

HTTP Working Group Chairman Mark Notthingham's preso [PDF]

Slide from the preso:

Ways we can FAIL

• Defining the perfect protocol that doesn’t

  get into implementations

• Spending five years fighting and gazing at

  our navels

• Only serving the needs of Web sites that

  serve N billion requests/day

• Not being deployable in corporates, over

  mobile, satellite, etc. (i.e., wherever HTTP/

  1.x is used)

• Trying to serve every possible use case

Spec'ing HTTP 2.0 has been such a clusterfuck. According to Mark in an email to the HTTP Working Group, as of January 2012 they were "past the four year mark (on a WG that was originally chartered for a year and a half)".

No wonder he's concerned about failure through "spending five years fighting and gazing at our navels." :)

Lucas, that comment really makes me think. So I shared it on Twitter, Google+ and Hacker News.

Also, Microsoft is really calling their product HTTP S+M?!?!?!

Who are the marketing geniuses who came up with that one?