HTTP WG meeting in Dallas: Summary

The HTTP working group met twice at the Dallas IETF. This is the
summary of the WG meeting; minutes will be available tomorrow. (Dave
Raggett has produced them from notes taken by the notes-takers, but I
promised to review them before sending them out.)

A revised set of milestones for the charter will be submitted
immediately.

- The HTTP/1.0 draft had been rejected as a 'best current practice'.
  The HTTP/1.0 draft will be revised to become an 'informational RFC'
  which describes common current practice.

- The HTTP/1.1 draft will be reviewed independently by separate
  sub-groups. The sub-groups are chartered to review the HTTP/1.1
  draft for text related to their issue, and propose changes to the
  HTTP/1.1 draft that consist of either wording changes, or movement
  of major chunks of HTTP/1.1 to separate documents, as appropriate.

  The issues are:

   * Persistent connections
      (this contains all of the 1.1 proposals for keep-alive,
       and maintaining connections to avoid TCP startup costs.)
   * Cache-control and proxy behavior
   * Content negotiation
   * Authentication
   * State management
   * Range retrievals
   * Extension mechanisms
   * other new methods and header features

The volunteers for these activities, and details of the subgroup tasks
will be elaborated in the minutes.

- Subgroups should conclude their work by Jan 96, in time to publish
  their conclusions (or lack thereof) to the rest of the WG so that
  new internet draft(s) for HTTP/1.1 will be ready in March 96 and
  ready for Proposed RFC status by June 96.

- Any proposed HTTP/1.1 features not in HTTP/1.0 for which there is no
  consensus will revert to HTTP/1.0 status in 1.1 and be considered
  for inclusion in HTTP/1.2.