It's a case where being worse in the "obvious" technical architecture allows you to be better in things that actually matter: ease of access, simplicity of use, lack of installing things and wide support.
Well, ubiquity != adequacy. I understood the original author's article as a technical recommendation. He basically suggests to use HTTP for everything because he thinks "it's technically good for everything".
He made broad claims about how any HTTP based protocol will magically scale by leveraging proxies, loadbalancers and other existing infrastructure, completely ignoring the fact that many applications just don't fit into the request/response paradigm in first place.
RSS is a great example for the power of the internet that enables us to "build on what we have" without waiting for some standards body or greater authority to get moving. But it is also a text-book counterexample to his scalability and "one size fits all" claims. Polling just doesn't scale for these things and technically it's a step back from Usenet, that had these problems sorted out already. We went back to square 1 with RSS and are now locked up there until we get a true WebSocket and worthwhile persistent storage in browsers.
Well, ubiquity != adequacy. I understood the original author's article as a technical recommendation. He basically suggests to use HTTP for everything because he thinks "it's technically good for everything".
He made broad claims about how any HTTP based protocol will magically scale by leveraging proxies, loadbalancers and other existing infrastructure, completely ignoring the fact that many applications just don't fit into the request/response paradigm in first place.
RSS is a great example for the power of the internet that enables us to "build on what we have" without waiting for some standards body or greater authority to get moving. But it is also a text-book counterexample to his scalability and "one size fits all" claims. Polling just doesn't scale for these things and technically it's a step back from Usenet, that had these problems sorted out already. We went back to square 1 with RSS and are now locked up there until we get a true WebSocket and worthwhile persistent storage in browsers.