Upgrading and Repairing Networks

The Beginning of HTTP

The beginning of HTTP started with a vendor-supported consortium called the World Wide Web consortum (W3C). Although WC3 was responsible for the creation of many Internet Web standards, the most prominent are the Hypertext Transfer Protocol and other Internet standards. In 1989, CERN (the High Energy Particle Physics Laboratory in Geneva, Switzerland) scientist Dr. Tim Berners-Lee developed the first version of HTTP, which was to help the World Wide Web gain popularity and grow dramatically. Instead of the usual email, FTP, and other utilities that the Internet was using at that time, the new HTTP allowed an easier way to share information quickly.

Because of the time involved in ongoing development of HTTP, CERN partnered with INRIA (the French National Institute of Research for Computer Science and Control). Today, many other organizations are involved in continuing the development of HTTP, such as the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) Laboratory for Computer Science, and the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF). Thus, you can find RFC (Request for Comments) documents on the Web about current and future development of the protocol.

Current proposed, informational, and standards RFCs include the following:

• RFC 1945, "Hypertext Transfer Protocol HTTP/1.0." Written in 1996 by Berners-Lee, R. Fielding, and H. Frystyk, this informational RFC was the beginning of the standardization process within the Internet community.

• RFC 2145, "Use and Interpretation of HTTP Version Numbers." This is also an informational RFC that further specifies how version numbers of the HTTP protocol should be used.

• RFC 2519, "HTTP Extensions for Distributed Authoring WEBDAV." This is a proposed standard.

• RFC 2831, "Using Digest Authentication as a SASL Mechanism." This RFC is also a proposed standard, and it discusses using SASL (Simple Authentication and Security Layer) to provide support for connection-based protocols, such as HTTP.

• RFC 2935, "Internet Open Trading Protocol (IOTP) HTTP Supplement." IOTP messages are transported as XML (Extensible Markup Language) documents. The goal of this RFC is to ensure that XML documents are successfully exchanged between the parties involved in the communication.

• RFC 3229, "Delta Encoding in HTTP." This RFC proposes a method for conserving valuable bandwidth on the Net by downloading only changes to cached Web pages. Rather than sending the entire data transported by HTTP, only changes, called delta encoding, are sent.

• RFC 3230, "Instance Digests in HTTP." This is another proposed standard for HTTP version 1.1 that describes the use of MD5 (Message Digest v. 5) to ensure reliable transport of data carried by HTTP. MD5, created by Ronald L. Rivest of MIT, is the third version of this encryption technique. The previous versions were MD2 and MD4.

• RFC 3310, "Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP) Digest Authentication Using Authentication and Key Agreement (AKA)." This is another informational RFC discussing authentication for use with HTTP.

The preceding RFCs (and others referenced in these RFCs) are recommended reading for those who want to pursue newer developments that may become part of the HTTP protocol in the near future.