As SPDY works its way through IETF ratification I began wondering whether it was really necessary to add a complex, binary protocol to the HTTP suite to improve HTTP performance. One of the main things that SPDY sets out to fix is defined in the opening paragraph of the SPDY proposal: One of the bottlenecks of HTTP implementations is that HTTP relies on multiple connections for concurrency. This causes several problems, including additional round trips for connection setup, slow-start delays, and connection rationing by the client, where it tries to avoid opening too many connections to any single server. HTTP pipelining helps some, but only achieves partial multiplexing. In addition, pipelining has proven non-deployable in existing browsers due to intermediary interference. The solution to this problem (as currently proposed) is SPDY. But I couldn't help thinking that solving the multiplexing problem could be done in a simpler manner within HTTP itself. And so here is a p