From 923a961f6ab6a9e569ad75e97b1474454ed92383 Mon Sep 17 00:00:00 2001 From: Victor Berger Date: Thu, 17 Mar 2016 17:17:15 +0100 Subject: [PATCH] FAQ: Add an answer about the choice of HTTP. --- supporting-docs/guides/2015-08-19-faq.md | 7 ++++++- 1 file changed, 6 insertions(+), 1 deletion(-) diff --git a/supporting-docs/guides/2015-08-19-faq.md b/supporting-docs/guides/2015-08-19-faq.md index acb67bb8..7b0acd8b 100644 --- a/supporting-docs/guides/2015-08-19-faq.md +++ b/supporting-docs/guides/2015-08-19-faq.md @@ -494,6 +494,12 @@ End-to-end encryption is coming shortly to clients for both 1:1 and group chats Privacy of metadata is not currently protected from server administrators - a malicious homeserver administrator can see who is talking to who and when, but not what is being said (once E2E encryption is enabled). See [this presentation from Jardin Entropique](http://matrix.org/~matthew/2015-06-26%20Matrix%20Jardin%20Entropique.pdf) for a more comprehensive discussion of privacy in Matrix. +##### Why HTTP? Doesn't HTTP suck? + +HTTP is indeed not the most efficient transport, but it is ubiquitous, very well understood and has numerous implementations on almost every platform and laguage. It also has a simple upgrade path to HTTP/2, which is relatively bandwidth and round-trip efficient. + +It has thus been chosen as the mandatory baseline of the exchange, but it is still entirely possible to use more fancy protocols for communication between clients and server (see for example this [websocket transport draft](https://github.com/matrix-org/matrix-doc/blob/master/drafts/websockets.rst)), and it's also possible in the future that negociation of more efficient protocols will be added for the federation between servers, HTTP+JSON remaining the compability baseline. + ### Implementations ##### What is Synapse? @@ -581,7 +587,6 @@ This FAQ is a constant work in progress - patches and pull requests are *very* w * What's on the roadmap? * How can I use Matrix to talk on Freenode or other IRC networks? * Where can I learn more about Matrix? (link to PDFs of other presentations etc) - * Why HTTP? Doesn't HTTP suck? * Why don't you use websockets? * Why is synapse so resource intensive immediately after federating for the first time? * \[your question goes here...\]