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316 points StalwartLabs | 1 comments | | HN request time: 0s | source
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9dev ◴[] No.45673491[source]
While JMAP seems to scratch every itch of a sucker for proper web API design, I’m wondering if the design space for new protocols should really be constrained to layers on top of HTTP. Is there really any new-ish binary protocol these days? Stuff like file sharing or groupware, mail, calendars, and so on—these things could be a lot more efficient and don’t really need the overhead of JSON as the message interchange format, IMHO. Then again, a lot of solid thinking went into these things, so there probably are a lot of good reasons that I’m not aware of.

Still, it’s an interesting space, I think.

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1. SchemaLoad ◴[] No.45675911[source]
How much overhead do you think fetching emails over http takes? Fetching text documents with HTTP seems like the prime usecase for it. And it's the only way you could have something that works in web clients.

I'm struggling to think of any real benefits to not using HTTP other than it would be more interesting.