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HTTP Current Status

This page summarizes the relationships among specifications, whether they are finished standards or drafts. Below, each title links to the most recent version of a document. For related introductory information, see: Privacy, Protocols, Protocols.

Drafts

Below are draft documents: other Working Drafts. Some of these may become Web Standards through the W3C Recommendation Track process. Others may be published as Group Notes or become obsolete specifications.

Other Working Drafts

2011-11-14

Tracking Preference Expression (DNT)

This specification defines the technical mechanisms for expressing a cross-site tracking preference and mechanisms for sites to signal whether and how they honor this preference.

2011-11-14

Tracking Compliance and Scope

This specification defines the meaning of a Do Not Track preference and sets out practices for websites to comply with this preference.
2011-10-20

Server-Sent Events

This specification defines an API for opening an HTTP connection for receiving push notifications from a server in the form of DOM events.
2011-05-10

HTTP Vocabulary in RDF 1.0

The identification of resources on the Web by URI alone may not be sufficient, as other factors such as HTTP content negotiation might come into play. This issue is particularly significant for quality assurance testing, conformance claims, and reporting languages like the W3C Evaluation And Report Language (EARL). This document provides a representation of the HTTP vocabulary in RDF, to allow quality assurance tools to record the HTTP headers that have been exchanged between a client and a server. The RDF terms defined by this document represent the core HTTP specification defined by RFC 2616, as well as additional HTTP headers registered by IANA. These terms can also be used to record HTTPS exchanges.
2011-05-10

Representing Content in RDF 1.0

This document is a specification for a vocabulary to represent Content in RDF. This vocabulary is intended to provide a flexible framework within different usage scenarios to semantically represent any type of content, be it on the Web or in local storage media. For example, it can be used by Web accessibility evaluation tools to record a representation of the assessed Web content in an Evaluation And Report Language (EARL) 1.0 Schema evaluation report. The document contains introductory information on its usage and some examples.

Obsolete Specifications

These specifications have either been superseded by others, or have been abandoned. They remain available for archival purposes, but are not intended to be used.

Retired

1998-07-10

HTTP-ng Web Interfaces

This is a sample short description for this specification; over time we will replace this description with a real one.
1998-07-10

HTTP-ng Architectural Model

This is a sample short description for this specification; over time we will replace this description with a real one.
1998-07-10

HTTP-ng Binary Wire Protocol

This is a sample short description for this specification; over time we will replace this description with a real one.
1998-07-10

SMUX Protocol Specification

This document defines the experimental multiplexing protocol referred to as "SMUX". SMUX is a session management protocol separating the underlying transport from the upper level application protocols. It provides a lightweight communication channel to the application layer by multiplexing data streams on top of a reliable stream oriented transport. By supporting coexistence of multiple application level protocols (e.g. HTTP and HTTP/NG), SMUX should ease transitions to future Web protocols, and communications of client applets using private protocols with servers over the same TCP connection as the HTTP conversation.
1998-07-10

Design of HTTP-ng Testbed

This is a sample short description for this specification; over time we will replace this description with a real one.
1998-03-27

Short- and Long-Term Goals for the HTTP-NG Project

This is a sample short description for this specification; over time we will replace this description with a real one.
1997-11-21

PEP Specification: an Extension Mechanism for HTTP

This is a sample short description for this specification; over time we will replace this description with a real one.
1997-01-06

Selecting Payment Mechanisms Over HTTP

This is a sample short description for this specification; over time we will replace this description with a real one.
1996-03-07

The ILU Requester: Object Services in HTTP Servers

The Common Gateway Interface (CGI) is not scaling to meet the requirements of today's dynamic, interactive webs. For this reason, multiple vendors have proposed C callable APIs. These APIs allow authors to alleviate the performance penalty of CGI, and allow tighter integration of add-in modules. Unfortunately, this comes at the price of complexity and portability.

This document describes a new model for extending WWW servers. First, HTTP is captured using an interface specification, which eliminates the ambiguities of interpretating a standards-track document. This interface is then implemented atop a particular httpd's API. Finally, all of this is done using a standard distributed object model called ILU.

Digital Creations' work on our ILU Requester reflects this design and shows its advantages. This paper describes the ILU Requester.

Resources Developed Outside W3C

The following resources are relevant to this area of work.

HTTPbis

2009-11-26: draft -08 of the revised HTTP/1.1 specifications (See HTTP/1.1 (RFC 2616) below)

HTTP State

See IETF's HTTPState Working Group page.

BiDirectional or Server-Initiated HTTP

See IETF's BiDirectional or Server-Initiated HTTP Working Group page.

RFC 2616

RFC 2616: Hypertext Transfer Protocol -- HTTP/1.1 describe the HTTP 1.1 protocol. Quoting from the RFC: " 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."

RFC 1945

RFC 1945: Hypertext Transfer Protocol -- HTTP/1.0 describes the common usage of the HTTP protocol in the early years of the Web.

HTTP 0.9

The Original HTTP as defined in 1991 is the historical documentation of the first definition of the HTTP protocol.