HTTP working group status; VOLUNTEERS needed

Alas, everyone has had some difficulties getting promised work done
(myself included, of course), so some items have been delayed. I'm
hoping we can get back on track in time to sucessfully conclude our
formal work at, or soon after, the December IETF meeting.

What we need:
*** REVIEW THE DOCUMENTS AND ISSUES
 We're down to the last stretch, folks. If you've been putting off
 paying attention, please do so now.
*** MAKE SPECIFIC SUGGESTIONS
 If you have some change you'd like, or a resolution for any of
 the open issues, specific wording suggestions are really important.
*** HELP DOCUMENT IMPLEMENTATIONS
 We need to document EVERY FEATURE of HTTP in AT LEAST TWO independent
 implementations. If any HTTP/1.1 implementors have a section-by-section
 review of which mandatory, suggested or optional features are implemented,
 please send them in. We especially need to flag those optional features
 that are NOT IMPLEMENTED.

Here are some recent changes in status, as far as I can recollect
based on recent changes to the issue list. The 'editing group' has
started to have weekly phone conferences again, in order to move
the drafting forward.

State management:

A LAST CALL was issued on the revised state management draft (without
privacy considerations). We've had some promises of review of the
(eviscerated) drafts.

Safe & UAHint:

I'm sorry for the unnecessary delay; these have (finally) been
sent on for Experimental RFC.

Content negotiation:

A BOF at the DC IETF has been scheduled. Ted Hardie has created
a new draft of the 'alternates' header; some of the other expected
revisions have not appeared yet.

Options:

I believe that the options draft is not going to move forward.
We'll attempt to clarify OPTIONS in the HTTP/1.1 spec primarily
as 'a method guaranteed not to do anything'.

Age calculation:

My reading is that the 'rough consensus' is to follow
draft-fielding-http-age-00.txt.

Hit metering:

has issued as RFC 2227 (Proposed Standard)

Revised draft:

Please note that what we were calling 'draft 08' is now
called 'Rev-00' in order to follow Internet Drafts conventions.

Remaining issues:

BYTERANGE_SYNTAX was added as an issue, raised from interoperability testing.
Jeff Mogul volunteered to propose wording.

HITMETER_FOR_HTTP10 (draft-harada-http-xconn-from-01) may proceed independently,
as it is not part of HTTP/1.1.

TRAILER_FIELDS (what header fields can go into trailers) is still open. The
current spec basically leaves it at 'none'. We'd like some wording that says 'a
sender can put any fields in the trailer that it's willing to have the recipient
ignore'.

RE-VERSION (version number isn't hop-by-hop) is still open.

REDIRECTS (how many redirects should be allowed, required) is still awaiting new
wording.

CONTENT-ENCODING has revised wording, but it's unclear if there's still an
issue.

RANGE-ERROR: based on feedback from interoperability testing, the issue has been
reopened.

Most other issues are awaiting wording and editorial work.

Received on Monday, 10 November 1997 23:01:26 UTC