Draft Minutes of HTTP Working Group, 33rd IETF Meeting, Stockholm

Please send me any additions/amendments, before I send these
in tomorrow afternoon.  Henrik is on vacation, and the minutes are due 
August 4, so I wrote up Henrik's notes.  At least we can get the minutes
in early...
					- Jim Gettys

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Draft Minutes of HTTP Working Group, 33rd IETF Meeting, in Stockholm

Reported by Jim Gettys from notes taken by Henrik Nielsen.

HTTP 1.0

We need to come up with a final draft before we can finish all discussion.
Draft will be available August 1, for anticipated last call later in the
month.

Access Authentication - MD5 digest

There is real no objections to the current state of this proposal. HTTP does
not provide possibility for having MIME headers after the HTTP object.

There are multiple implementations:

   *  NCSA server and client
   *  Spyglass
   *  Dave Kristol's server

HTTP Session Extension

Ted Hardie, NASA, led this discussion.

   *  This proposal would avoid TCP latency, overhead, and slow start
     performance problems.
   *  Ted described a proposal from Alex Hopmann, who was not present
   *  Henrik noted that Request-ID header makes the proposal more flexible
     as the server can send them back out of order
   *  There was general talk about sessions with a server.
   *  Jeff Mogul of DECWRL has made an extensive study and simulation of
     persistent connection HTTP. The results of this work can be found at
     http://www.research.digital.com/wrl/publications/abstracts/95.4.html
   *  Is it a good idea to save headers while a connection is kept alive?
        o  Eric Sink: No big advantage - 10% (from implementation)
        o  Masinter: Too early to say
        o  authentication may be the biggest performance win.
   *  A number of implementations were mentioned; performance is unclear,
     and most likely to be seen over long haul and dial up lines, rather
     than in a local network, where most naive tests are performed.
   *  The general consensus is that persistent connections are a good idea.
     There are concerns about upward compatibility and interoperability with
     1.0; this may or may not require 1.1; it was suggested that operation
     under 1.0 might be written up as an experimental protocol.
   *  An open question is the timeouts for the tcp connection; there is some
     data from Jeff Mogul's simulation.

MIME multi-part

MIME multi-part was not discussed.

Session-ID, Request-ID, cookies

No one wanted to talk about it at this meeting.

Problem with HTTP PUT and POST

Henrik Nielsen described a problem with HTTP PUT and POST that has recently
been uncovered, and solicited feedback.

HTTP/1.1

A HTTP/1.1 draft will be available in mid-August.

HTTP/NG

HTTP/NG: Andy Norman, Ange@hplb.hpl.hp.com. Stefek Zaba has an experimental
implementation of what they call HTTP/NG, and has been taking to Simon
Spero. Simon was not at the meeting, so there was little discussion of NG.

Larry Masinter asserted that HTTP must support transactions. Larry also
commented that RPC keeps the connection open; but we may be reinventing the
wheel, and would rather see a general HTTP maybe using RPC. This begs the
question: Who has implemented a non-blocking (streaming) RPC system that can
be used if we are to avoid rolling our own?

Feedback from John Klensin, and Harald Alvestrand, Area Directors for
Applications

John Klensin expressed great displeasure with the current state of the
working group. Some issues he raised, but not necessarily an exhaustive list
include:

   * Working group chairs that do not warn the area director before an IETF
     meeting that they cannot attend are asking to be shot. John promised to
     convey his displeasure directly to the chairs.
   * How will we make progress?
   * We have a collective problem in the working group. We should stick to
     the milestones.
   * Without NG as a milestone for this group, 1.1 will likely end up out of
     control. Without Simon Spero present, and with his RSI problems, John
     is very concerned about NG. Jim Gettys volunteered to edit HTTP/NG, if
     Simon is unable to deal with it due to his problems. When will it
     become a proposed standard?

Harald Alvestrand noted that there is no reason to wait for an IETF meeting
in to send a document to the IESG for standardization.

Proposed New Milestones

AUG 95 send HTTP/1.0 of to IESG as proposed standard.
OCT 95 Session as experimental extension.
APR 96 HTTP/1.1 as proposed standard
DEC 96 HTTP/NG as proposed standard. Jim Gettys volunteered to help Simon
with writing.

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