Hypertext Transfer Protocol -- HTTP/1.1
draft-lafon-rfc2616bis-04

Abstract

The Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP) is an application-level protocol for distributed, collaborative, hypermedia information systems. It is a generic, stateless, protocol which can be used for many tasks beyond its use for hypertext, such as name servers and distributed object management systems, through extension of its request methods, error codes and headers [RFC2324]. A feature of HTTP is the typing and negotiation of data representation, allowing systems to be built independently of the data being transferred. HTTP has been in use by the World-Wide Web global information initiative since 1990. This specification defines the protocol referred to as "HTTP/1.1", and is an update to RFC2616.Editorial Note (To be removed by RFC Editor before publication) Distribution of this document is unlimited. Please send comments to the Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP) mailing list at ietf-http-wg@w3.org [1], which may be joined by sending a message with subject "subscribe" to ietf-http-wg-request@w3.org [2]. Discussions of the HTTP working group are archived at <http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/ietf-http-wg/>. XML versions, latest edits and the issues list for this document are available from <http://www.w3.org/Protocols/HTTP/1.1/rfc2616bis/>. The purpose of this document is to revise [RFC2616], doing only minimal corrections. For now, it is not planned to advance the standards level of HTTP, thus - if published - the specification will still be a "Proposed Standard" (see [RFC2026]). The current plan is to incorporate known errata, and to update the specification text according to the current IETF publication guidelines. In particular: o Incorporate the corrections collected in the RFC2616 errata document (<http://purl.org/NET/http-errata>) (most of the suggested fixes have been applied to draft 01 [3]). o Incorporate corrections for newly discovered and agreed-upon problems, using the HTTP WG mailing list as forum and <http://www.w3.org/Protocols/HTTP/1.1/rfc2616bis/issues/> as issues list. o Update references, and re-classify them into "Normative" and "Informative", based on the prior work done by Jim Gettys in <http://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-gettys-http-v11-spec-rev-00>. This document is based on a variant of the original RFC2616 specification formatted using Marshall T. Rose's "xml2rfc" tool (see <http://xml.resource.org>) and therefore deviates from the original text in word wrapping, page breaks, list formatting, reference formatting, whitespace usage and appendix numbering. Otherwise, it is supposed to contain an accurate copy of the original specification text. See <http://www.w3.org/Protocols/HTTP/1.1/ rfc2616bis-00-from-rfc2616.diff.html> for a comparison between both documents, as generated by "rfcdiff" (<http://tools.ietf.org/tools/rfcdiff/>).

Authors

Roy T. Fielding
Jeffrey Mogul
Henrik Nielsen
Larry M Masinter
Paul J. Leach
Tim Berners-Lee
Yves Lafon
Julian Reschke

(Note: The e-mail addresses provided for the authors of this Internet-Draft may no longer be valid.)