HTTP: The Definitive Guide

Current Status

At the end of 1998, the HTTP-NG team concluded that it was too early to bring the HTTP-NG proposals to the IETF for standardization. There was concern that the industry and community had not yet fully adjusted to HTTP/1.1 and that the significant HTTP-NG rearchitecture to a distributed-objects paradigm would have been extremely disruptive without a clear transition plan.

Two proposals were made:

• Instead of attempting to promote the entire HTTP-NG rearchitecture in one step, it was proposed to focus on the WebMUX transport technology. But, at the time of this writing, there hasn’t been sufficient interest to establish a WebMUX working group.

• An effort was launched to investigate whether formal protocol types can be made flexible enough for use on the Web, perhaps using XML. This is especially important for a distributed-objects system that is extensible. This work is still in progress.

At the time of this writing, no major driving HTTP-NG effort is underway. But, with the ever-increasing use of HTTP, its growing use as a platform for diverse applications, and the growing adoption of wireless and consumer Internet technology, some of the techniques proposed in the HTTP-NG effort may prove significant in HTTP’s teenage years.