HTTP/0.95 - the sweet spot or thereabouts?

[solderpunk]

On Tue, Jun 16, 2020 at 08:21:51PM +0100, Luke Emmet wrote:
 
> So what I think we need is something around HTTP 0.95 (it never existed)
> which is about half way between HTTP 0.9 and 1.0.
> 
> GET (gemini right now)
> POST (for non-idempotent interactions)
> Content-Length indicator (to make POST work)
> 
> no other headers, so not extensible, so not as far as HTTP 1.0, but allows
> application development.

This sounds really nice (honestly!), but the big problem for me was
always: how does the client tell the server if it's doing a GET or a
POST without the protocol including some kind of marker for this, which
could then potentially get extended ad infinitum by people defining
their own equivalents to HEAD and PUT and etc, etc?  It's the usual
theme: if you have *one* of something, it can be implicit, and as such
nobody can try alternative values.  As soon as you have two or more, you
need to tell the server about it, and then people can try telling it
different things, and before long there is more than just two...

Cheers,
Solderpunk