Current Status

10.10 Current Status

At the end of 1998, the HTTP-NG team concluded that it was too early to bring the HTTP-NG proposals to the IETF for standardization. There was concern that the industry and community had not yet fully adjusted to HTTP/1.1 and that the significant HTTP-NG rearchitecture to a distributed-objects paradigm would have been extremely disruptive without a clear transition plan.

Two proposals were made:

                Instead of attempting to promote the entire HTTP-NG rearchitecture in one step, it was proposed to focus on the WebMUX transport technology. But, at the time of this writing, there hasn't been sufficient interest to establish a WebMUX working group.

                An effort was launched to investigate whether formal protocol types can be made flexible enough for use on the Web, perhaps using XML. This is especially important for a distributed-objects system that is extensible. This work is still in progress.

At the time of this writing, no major driving HTTP-NG effort is underway. But, with the ever-increasing use of HTTP, its growing use as a platform for diverse applications, and the growing adoption of wireless and consumer Internet technology, some of the techniques proposed in the HTTP-NG effort may prove significant in HTTP's teenage years.