Subject: Protocol Action: 'Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP/1.1): Message Syntax and Routing' to Proposed Standard (draft-ietf-httpbis-p1-messaging-26.txt)

From: The IESG <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 12 Feb 2014 06:47:08 -0800

The IESG has approved the following document:
- 'Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP/1.1): Message Syntax and Routing'
  (draft-ietf-httpbis-p1-messaging-26.txt) as Proposed Standard

This document is the product of the Hypertext Transfer Protocol Bis
Working Group.

The IESG contact persons are Barry Leiba and Pete Resnick.

A URL of this Internet Draft is:
http://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/draft-ietf-httpbis-p1-messaging/

Technical Summary

The Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP) is an application-level protocol for
distributed, collaborative, hypertext information systems. HTTP has been in use
by the World Wide Web global information initiative since 1990. This document
provides an overview of HTTP architecture and its associated terminology,
defines the "http" and "https" Uniform Resource Identifier (URI) schemes,
defines the HTTP/1.1 message syntax and parsing requirements, and describes
general security concerns for implementations.

The Working Group has chosen Proposed Standard because this is a substantial
revision of the text, compared to RFC2616. We anticipate moving to Internet
Standard subsequently.

Note that this document is part of a set, which should be reviewed together:

* draft-ietf-httpbis-p1-messaging
* draft-ietf-httpbis-p2-semantics
* draft-ietf-httpbis-p4-conditional
* draft-ietf-httpbis-p5-range
* draft-ietf-httpbis-p6-cache
* draft-ietf-httpbis-p7-auth
* draft-ietf-httpbis-method-registrations
* draft-ietf-httpbis-authscheme-registrations

Review and Consensus

As chartered, this work was very constrained; the WG sought only to clarify
RFC2616, making significant technical changes only where there were
considerably interoperability or security issues. 

While the bulk of the work was done by a core team of editors, it has been
reviewed by a substantial number of implementers, and design issues enjoyed
input from many of them. 

It has been through two Working Group Last Calls, with multiple reviewers each
time. We have also discussed this work with external groups (e.g., the W3C TAG).

We were not able to get consensus on text to add regarding Security
Considerations for interception of unencrypted HTTP traffic.

Downward references

* RFC1950
* RFC1951 (already in downref registry)
* RFC1952
* "Welch"

Personnel

Document Shepherd: Mark Nottingham 
Responsible Area Director: Barry Leiba