Getting (Officially) Started on HTTP/2.0

As you may have seen, our re-charter has been approved by the IESG. 

If you aren't familiar with the final text, please take a moment and carefully read it:
  http://datatracker.ietf.org/wg/httpbis/charter/

First and foremost, we will continue working on the revision of the HTTP/1.1 specification. Roy has recently finished his work on p1, and should finish p2 soon. As such, we'll be entering WGLC on these documents and prioritising any discussion on them until finished. Stay tuned for details.

Work on HTTP/2.0 will start by creating draft-ietf-httpbis-http2-00, based upon draft-mbelshe-httpbis-spdy-00. That draft will list Mike Belshe and Roberto Peon as authors, to acknowledge their contribution.

However, we will have a separate editorial team in charge of the Working Group's drafts. After extensive discussions and consultation with our AD, I've asked Julian Reschke, Alexey Melnikov and Martin Thomson to serve as editors of the HTTP/2.0 draft.

Concurrently, we should start gathering issues against the draft for discussion; just as with the previous work, I'd like to structure as much of our discussion as possible around concretely identified issues. 

I'll kick that process off by nominating obvious discussion points like the upgrade mechanism, header compression, intermediaries, and server push, but of course anyone can raise a new issue, using the guidelines on our wiki page <http://trac.tools.ietf.org/wg/httpbis/trac/wiki>.

There are two things that we need to settle fairly quickly:

1. How we identify the protocol on the wire. It's likely that we're going to have a few different revisions of what we specify implemented as we move along, and I want us to be crystal-clear about how that will be managed, so we're not stuck with interop problems down the road.

2. What requirements we have for negotiation of HTTP2 within TLS. As you should have seen, that portion of the work has been given to the TLS Working Group, and we need to give them some guidance about what we need.

Following that, I suspect it'll be most useful to work on the upgrade mechanism (which will also help with #1 above). Patrick sent out what I think most people agree is a good starting point for that discussion here: <http://www.w3.org/mid/1345470312.2877.55.camel@ds9>. 

We'll start these discussions soon, using the Atlanta meeting as a checkpoint for the work. If its' going well by then (i.e., we have a good set of issues and some healthy discussion, ideally with some data starting to emerge), I'd expect us to schedule an interim meeting sometime early next year, to have more substantial discussion.

More details to follow. Thanks to everybody for helping get us this far, as well as to Martin, Alexey and Julian for volunteering their time.

Regards,

--
Mark Nottingham
http://www.mnot.net/

Received on Tuesday, 2 October 2012 16:48:35 UTC