IETF 99 - HTTPtre
Julian Reschke, greenbytes
History of HTTP in the IETF
Observations:
- It took long to restart work on HTTP/1.1 (~8 years)
- It took long to finish the last revision of HTTP/1.1 (~ 6 years)
- There are two current HTTP specifications (HTTP/1.1 and HTTP/2)
Why and when to update
- RFCs are immutable documents
- We collect errata and occasionally revise
- ...but the errata are incomplete and hard to discover (RFC-Editor???)
- If we start now, we won't be ready before 2018, which would be 4 years after publication of RFC 723x
- Eventually, the new RFC format will allow us to make the officially published versions more readable
Scope - the obvious
Scope - the less obvious
Re-organize once more?
- Split information specific exclusively to HTTP/1.1 into a separate document and relabel everything else just "HTTP"
- Recombine some or all of RFC7231..RFC7235 into a single document
Include stuff that should have been part of HTTP in the first place?
...advance to full standard? (maymight conflict with other goals)
Next steps
- Motivate people to report their issues
- Discuss scope & timing
- Relation to QUIC work (people overlap, potential effects for HTTP over QUIC)
- Scope will affect how we do things, as potential re-organizations would need to be done very carefully
Shameless plug: annotating HTML versions of RFCs
We can inline some errata information already (in inofficial variants, that is):
...and we could extend that to information in Github issues.
Shameless plug: annotating HTML versions of RFCs
We can inline some errata information already (in inofficial variants, that is):
...and we could extend that to information in Github issues.