Technical Summary
The Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP) is an application-level protocol for
distributed, collaborative, hypertext information systems. This document
defines the semantics of HTTP/1.1 messages, as expressed by request methods,
request header fields, response status codes, and response header fields, along
with the payload of messages (metadata and body content) and mechanisms for
content negotiation.
Note that this document is part of a set, which should be reviewed together:
* draft-ietf-httpbis-p1-messaging
* draft-ietf-httpbis-p2-semantics
* draft-ietf-httpbis-p4-conditional
* draft-ietf-httpbis-p5-range
* draft-ietf-httpbis-p6-cache
* draft-ietf-httpbis-p7-auth
* draft-ietf-httpbis-method-registrations
* draft-ietf-httpbis-authscheme-registrations
Review and Consensus
As chartered, this work was very constrained; the WG sought only to clarify
RFC2616, making significant technical changes only where there were
considerably interoperability or security issues.
While the bulk of the work was done by a core team of editors, it has been
reviewed by a substantial number of implementers, and design issues enjoyed
input from many of them.
It has been through two Working Group Last Calls, with multiple reviewers each
time. We have also discussed this work with external groups (e.g., the W3C TAG).
Downward references
* RFC1950
* RFC1951 (already in downref registry)
* RFC1952
* "Welch"
Personnel
Document Shepherd: Mark Nottingham
Responsible Area Director: Barry Leiba
RFC Editor Note
Please update the reference to RFC1305 to point instead to RFC5905