bagder/http2-explained

8.1 head of line blocking

polettix opened this issue · 0 comments

In section 8.1. How will http2 affect ordinary humans?:

http2 [...] avoids the head of line blocking dilemma completely [...]

I would argue that this is a bit misleading today.

While I agree that it removes HOL blocking as compared to pipelining in HTTP/1.1, readers might be induced to think that the problem goes away entirely, while it might still affect sessions "thanks" to TCP.

I would rephrase:

http2 reduces the number of necessary network round-trips and it avoids the head of line blocking dilemma of HTTP/1.1 pipelining with multiplexing and fast discarding of unwanted streams. (Head of
line blocking might still affect connections because of TCP though, which will hopefully be fixed by the new protocol QUIC).

or something along this line.