HTTP => SPDY

ongoing by Tim Bray · Rebuilding the Foundation:

HTTP has been the most successful application protocol ever invented, by a wide margin.

“SPDY” is a drop-in re­place­ment for HTTP net­work­ing that 
should be in­vis­i­ble to both clients and servers. 
It was cooked up at Google, and is built into Chrome and Fire­fox,
and a lot of the servers at Google use it. 

Mike Belshe, who’s sort of seen as the guy be­hind SPDY,
used to work for Google but doesn’t any more."

SPDY does not replace HTTP; it modifies the way HTTP requests and responses are sent over the wire. This means that all existing server-side applications can be used without modification if a SPDY-compatible translation layer is put in place. When sent over SPDY, HTTP requests are processed, tokenized, simplified and compressed. For example, each SPDY endpoint keeps track of which headers have been sent in the past requests and can avoid resending the headers that have not changed; those that must be sent are sent compressed.