Subject: Last Call for comments on "Delta encoding in HTTP"

From: Jeffrey Mogul <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 19 Sep 2000 11:41:23 -0700

After too many months and too many drafts, those of us who
have been working on a proposed specification for Delta
Encoding in HTTP seem to have reached a consensus on the
basic design:

	Title		: Delta encoding in HTTP
	Author(s)	: J. Mogul, B. Krishnamurthy, F. Douglis, 
                          A. Feldmann, Y. Goland
	Filename	: draft-mogul-http-delta-06.txt
	Pages		: 46
	Date		: 25-Aug-00
	
    Many HTTP requests cause the retrieval of slightly modified
    instances of resources for which the client already has a
    cache entry.  Research has shown that such modifying
    updates are frequent, and that the modifications are
    typically much smaller than the actual entity.  In such
    cases, HTTP would make more efficient use of network
    bandwidth if it could transfer a minimal description of the
    changes, rather than the entire new instance of the
    resource.  This is called 'delta encoding.'  This
    document describes how delta encoding can be supported as a
    compatible extension to HTTP/1.1.
    
    A URL for this Internet-Draft is:
    http://www.ietf.org/internet-drafts/draft-mogul-http-delta-06.txt

Although this draft is NOT a product of the HTTP WG, we would
like to give the WG the traditional two-week Last Call period
for comments before we ask the IESG to approve this draft as
a Proposed Standard.

NOTE: we have removed from this document any support for
"Clustering" and "Templates", which are now optional
features described in a separate draft:
   http://www.ietf.org/internet-drafts/draft-mogul-http-dcluster-00.txt
This draft is NOT ready for submission to the IESG, and these
features are NOT up for discussion as part of this "Last Call."

-Jeff