Persistent-connections subgroup status

The persistent connections subgroup has made a lot of progress.
We held a meeting last Friday, at which we came to a consensus
on what amounts to a minor variation of the experimental Keep-Alive:
and Connection: headers.  The primary issue was how to deal with
HTTP/1.0 proxies in a reliable way, and we believe we have a simple
solution.

There is still some debate about whether the spec should include
a "Proxy-connection:" header, which has been used by a few vendors
without any prior documentation, and which is clearly prone to
failure in certain contexts.

We have several remaining issues.  One is how responses should be
terminated.  The two possible options (besides Content-length:, which
is not always an option) are chunking and multipart; we are apparently
agreed that one of these ought to be available in all cases where a
client has requested a persistent connection, so that the servers will
have something to depend on, but we are not agreed which option(s)
should be required by the spec.

We are also expecting to consider the issue of "sticky headers"
(previously these had gone under a different name), which allows
a client or server to avoid retransmitting headers that don't
change between messages on a single connection.

-Jeff

Received on Friday, 19 January 1996 12:15:17 UTC