HyperText Transfer Protocol (http) Charter

Chair

• Larry Masinter <masinter@parc.xerox.com>

Applications Area Director(s):

• Keith Moore <moore+iesg@cs.utk.edu>
• Harald Alvestrand <Harald.T.Alvestrand@uninett.no>

Area Advisor

• Keith Moore <moore+iesg@cs.utk.edu>

Mailing List Information

• General Discussion:http-wg@cuckoo.hpl.hp.com
• To Subscribe: http-wg-request@cuckoo.hpl.hp.com
• In Body: subscribe http-wg Your Full Name
• Archive: http://www.ics.uci.edu/pub/ietf/http/hypermail

Description of Working Group

Note: This working group is jointly chartered by the Applications Area and the Transport Services Area.

The HTTP Working Group will work on the specification of the Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP). HTTP is a data access protocol currently run over TCP and is the basis of the World-Wide Web. The initial work will be to document existing practice and short-term extensions. Subsequent work will be to extend and revise the protocol. Directions which have already been mentioned include improved efficiency, extended operations, extended negotiation, richer metainformation, and ties with security protocols.

Note: the HTTP working group will not address HTTP security extensions as these are expected to be the topic of another working group.

Background information

The initial specification of the HTTP protocol was kept in hypertext form and a snapshot circulated as an Internet draft between 11/93 and 5/94. A revision of the specification by Berners-Lee, Fielding and Frystyk Nielsen has been circulated as an Internet draft between 11/94 and 5/95. The working group expanded and completed that document to reflect HTTP/1.0 as it has been implemented by World-Wide Web clients and servers prior to November 1994. The resulting specification of HTTP/1.0 was published as an Informational RFC.

Subsequently, a revised protocol, HTTP/1.1, was published as a Proposed Standard. The working group is now considering clarifications, enhancements, to reflect implementation experience in a revised Draft Standard for HTTP.

Goals and Milestones

March 1997

Simple Hit-Metering as Proposed Standard

April1997

PEP as Proposed Standard.

May1997

Content negotiation suite as Proposed Standard(s), Feature Registration as BCP.

June 1997

Revised HTTP/1.1 draft as Draft Standard.

Current Internet-Drafts

• PEP: an Extension Mechanism for HTTP (28671 bytes)
• Transparent Content Negotiation in HTTP (91507 bytes)
• HTTP State Management Mechanism (42387 bytes). (There is also a PostScript version [ 75840 bytes].)
• Simple Hit-Metering for HTTP Preliminary Draft (81661 bytes)
• Feature Tag Registration Procedures (37628 bytes)
• Use and interpretation of HTTP version numbers (14231 bytes)
• HTTP State Management Mechanism (Errata) (4548 bytes). (There is also a PostScript version [ 12189 bytes].)
• HTTP Remote Variant Selection Algorithm -- RVSA/1.0 (26645 bytes)

Request for Comments

• Hypertext Transfer Protocol -- HTTP/1.0 (RFC 1945) (137582 bytes)
• An Extension to HTTP: Digest Access Authentication (RFC 2069) (41733 bytes)
• Hypertext Transfer Protocol -- HTTP/1.1 (RFC 2068) (378114 bytes)

Please send questions, comments, and/or suggestions to ietf-web@ietf.org.

Return to working group directory.

Return to IETF home page.