Note archive.netbsd.org has been fixed since then. 1.6 is retrievable again.

I have addressed the value (to me) of HTTP/1.1 pipelining in many comments, despite consistent backlash from HN commenters trying to promote new protocols that make surveillance and advertising easier and add needless complexity to information retrieval. I have been sharing the simple, unsophisticated programs I write to perform pipelining outside the browser.

Given that I do not "browse the web" the same way that most HN commenters and programming nerd bloggers/website operators would advocate, it should not be surprising that I also do not subscribe to their idea of websites. (Conglomerations of ads, tracking and resources from disparate IP addresses that require "interaction".) I retain an older, simpler idea of websites: all resources from a single IP address. That allows for easy pipelining to efficiently retrieve information non-interactively.

For communication, i.e., 1-to-1 or 1-to-smallnumber, I have always prefered the idea of peer-to-peer overlay networks, long before they became as "popular" as they are today. Not websites. Why are so many people reading "news" on Facebook, why the large audience. Possibly they are actually using its website to communicate or interact with individuals or small groups and that's why they log in. And here I am submitting this comment while logged in to... a website.

Is this how I think we should be communicating over the internet. Via websites. No. From what I see, it is the source of many problems. But, here we are. Comunicating via someone else's website.

One of the uses I make of HTTP/1.1 pipelining is for retrieving DNS data in bulk via "DoH". Sometime after I started doing this years ago I noticed someone else was implementing pipelining when using "DoT". Not sure what to make of that, if anything.

Another use is for "Web APIs".

Another use is for retrieving bulk HTML via XML sitemaps.

Anytime I want to retrieve and consume data/information efficiently in quantity, HTTP/1.1 pipelining is useful.

Web browsers, whether text-only HTML viewers or media players with Javascript engines, can be useful but I tend to do most "browsing" offline from simple HTML pages I have created using text/html/json that I have retrieved from the www and processed outside the browser. I do not use a browser as the primary means of sending HTTP requests nor do I use Javascript as the means to process text/html/json into a format that I can consume. The preferred formats for me are plaintext, CSV and SQLite3, comprised of 7-bit ASCII if possible. I retrieve the bits from the web using command line programs and then process to those formats, if needed, using small filter programs I write.

Popular web browsers cannot do HTTP/1.1 pipelining. HTTP/1.1 pipelining is not advertising-friendly. Popular web browsers, namely the company/companies behind them, have developed "replacement" protocols that are very advertising-friendly. They tell the public that HTTP/1.1 was a "problem" that needed to be fixed. The question is who was it allegedly a problem for, exactly: for those companies or for www users.

I'm using HTTP/1.1 pipeliing every day for over 20 years. I'm not seeing any ads. Not a problem for me.