HTTP - Hypertext Transfer Protocol Overview

News | HTTP Activity | Specs | Software | Talks | Mailing lists | IETF | HTTP Extensions | WebMux | HTTP-NG | Web Characterization | Background

News,Updates, and Events

• Dec 16, 1998: Jose Kahan announces client-side Digest Authentication implementation in libwww - try it out!

See also the HTTP timeline for older events

Specifications, Drafts, Papers and Reports

HTTP Working Group

• List of all HTTP RFCs
  • RFC 2616: Hypertext Transfer Protocol -- HTTP/1.1
  • RFC 2617: HTTP Authentication: Basic and Digest Access Authentication
• Previous HTTP specifications and drafts. If you are looking for previous drafts then have a look at the HTTP draft specification change history
• The IETF HTTP working group list of Internet drafts and RFCs
• The Distributed Authoring and Versioning working group maintains a list of their drafts
• David M. Kristol maintains a page on HTTP State Management - a.k.a. cookies
• Koen Holtman maintains a page on transparent HTTP content negotiation

Related Protocols

HTTP Extension Framework

An extension mechanism for HTTP designed to address the tension between private agreement and public specification and to accommodate extension of HTTP clients and servers by software components

Multiplexing Protocol (MUX)

A draft proposal for introducing asynchronous messaging support at a layer below HTTP

Handling of fragment identifiers in redirected URLs

An Internet Draft with a proposal for an issue that HTTP leaves unspecified.

HTTP-NG - Hypertext Transfer Protocol - Next Generation

a former W3C Activity on reengineering the basic protocol architecture by using modularity, simplicity and layering.

Background

• Overview of Time - What is the state of time on the Internet?
• Interesting Papers and MUST reads! A collection of papers from work shops, conferences etc.
• Compression and HTTP - also check out the comprehensive compression overview
• Classic HTTP Documents - read how it all started

HTTP Sample Software

W3C offers the Jigsaw server written in Java and the libwww client API - both released with a full set of HTTP/1.1 functionality including caching and persistent connections. Please see the W3C open source contributions for more details.

Talks and Presentations

Preliminary HTTP/1.1 Performance Evaluation by Jim Gettys

The HTTP/1.1 performance paper explains the experiments in detail, and was recently submitted for publication. This work shows how you can gain as much as a factor of 10 in number of packets and 2 in times of speed by using HTTP/1.1 pipelining. Earliest results were presented at the IETF meeting in San Jose, December 1996, and more complete results at the W3C Advisory Committee Meeting in England in January.

Overview of new HTTP/1.1 functionality and changes from HTTP/1.0 by Jim Gettys

This presentation gives a good overview of new features. It will be updated occasionally as it is presented. The presentation is also available for Microsoft PowerPoint

PEP - An Extension Mechanism for HTTP by Henrik Frystyk Nielsen and Rohit Khare

This presentation was given at the IETF meeting in Montreal, June 1996.

HTTP Mailing lists

There are several mailing lists that you are welcome to use. As several of them are very high volume then please check out the archives first to see if the topic that you want to bring up in fact already has been discussed. As we try to make as much progress on HTTP as possible it is very important that we can stay focused - even on open mailing lists!

ietf-http-wg@w3.org (Archived at W3C (see also the 1994 to 2002 archives).

The official mailing list of the IETF HTTP working group.

w3c-http@w3.org (Archive)

This is a W3C mailing list dedicated to promote HTTP/1.1 implementation, to gain sufficient experience among W3C Members to support the specification, and ease

development of HTTP/1.1 software and applications. The list is only accessible to W3C members.

www-talk@w3.org (Archive)

This is the primary public mailing list for technical discussion among those developing World Wide Web software. It is explicitly intended for the collaborative design of new systems, software, protocols, and documentation which may be useful to the WWW developer community. General questions from non-developers should go one of the many newsgroups.

www-speed@tipper.oit.unc.edu (Information)

This list is no longer maintained and is not active anymore. Do not post any mails to this address!

See also the information on HTTP-NG

IETF Related Information

The Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) is the protocol engineering and development arm of the Internet. The IETF is a large open international community of network designers, operators, vendors, and researchers concerned with the evolution of the Internet architecture and the smooth operation of the Internet. It is open to any interested individual.

• Current Internet Drafts (IDs)
• Request for Comments (RFCs) and another very nice interface to RFCs
• Information on Internet Official Protocol Standards and
• Internet Standards Process about the IETF standards process.

Working Groups Related to HTTP

These are the IETF working groups working on HTTP directly related issues:

• Content Negotiation (conneg) IETF Working Group with mailing list and archives
• HTTP wg (http) with mailing list and archives
• WWW Distributed Authoring and Versioning (webdav) with mailing list and archives
• Web Transaction Security wg (wts)

Paul Hoffman at the Internet Mail Consortium maintains an excellent list of IETF working groups directly related to Internet Mail. The following list are working groups of more distant nature relative to HTTP.

• Application Configuration Access Protocol wg (acap)
• Internet Printing Protocol (ipp)
• Multiparty Multimedia Session Control (mmusic)
• TCP Implementation (tcpimpl)

You can also check the full list of IETF working groups.

IETF Meetings

Also check out the IETF meeting page for the latest information. We keep a small list of notes from previous HTTP wg meetings at various IETF meetings:

Los Angeles, CA, USA, March-April1998

Where, how-to, agenda etc.

Washington, DC, USA, December 1997

HTTP-WG notes from the meeting and the complete on-line Procedings

Munich, Germany, 11-15 August 1997

HTTP-WG notes from the meeting and the complete on-line Proceedings

Memphis, TN, 7-11 April 1997

HTTP-WG notes from the meeting and the complete on-line Proceedings

San Jose, CA, 9-13 December 1996

HTTP-WG notes from the meeting and the complete on-line proceedings.

Montreal, Quebec CANADA, 24-28 June 1996

HTTP-WG notes from the meeting

Other Organizations Related to IETF

An unordered list of organizations related to IETF:

• The Internet Engineering Steering Group (IESG) which consists of the IETF Area directors together with the Chair of the IETF.
• The Internet Research Task Force (IRTF) is a composed of a number of focused, long-term, small Research Groups. These groups work on topics related to Internet protocols, applications, architecture and technology.
• The Internet Architecture Board (IAB) is a body of the Internet Society responsible for overall architectural considerations in the Internet.
• The Internet Society (ISOC) is a non-governmental International organization for global cooperation and coordination for the Internet and its internetworking technologies and applications.
• The Internet Assigned Numbers Authority (IANA) is the central coordinator for the assignment of unique parameter values for Internet protocols

Other Areas and Protocols

• The HTTP-NG activity has information about  the former W3C HTTP-NG Activity
• The Propagation, Caching and Replication area has a lot of information about caching schemes and scalability
• Internet Message Access Protocol (IMAP) is a method of accessing electronic mail or bulletin board messages that are kept on a (possibly shared) mail server
• Next Generation Internet (NGI) Initiative. On October 10, 1996, President Clinton and Vice President Gore announced their commitment to the Next Generation Internet (NGI) Initiative, based upon strong research and development programs across Federal agencies.
• The Web Robots Pages - information about Web robots and how to manage them
• What's the Internet weather like? A really useful service from UCLA
• A few other Internet protocols relevant to HTTP

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