WWW: Beyond the Basics

16. HTTP and related Protocols

by Mir Farooq Ali

ABSTRACT

The World Wide Web has grown dramatically in the last five years. The primary protocol for the web, HTTP now accounts for the majority of the NSF backbone traffic. With this change has come a need to revise the existing HTTP protocol. HTTP/1.1 and HTTP-NG are proposed extensions to the HTTP protocol increasing the basic functionality and extending it. The growth of the Internet has fueled a lot of interest in Web-commerce too. This brings the issue of security on the net. S-HTTP is a proposed extension to HTTP to make it more suitable for ``secure'' transactions on the web. When we have many proposed extensions to HTTP, then there is a need for coordination between the different versions. Protocol Extension Protocol or PEP is a system for HTTP clients, servers and proxies to reliably reason about custom extensions to HTTP. In this chapter, we present a brief introduction to the basic HTTP protocol and its design issues, before talking about HTTP/1.1, HTTP-NG, S-HTTP and PEP.

CHAPTER CONTENT

  1. Introduction
    1. History of HTTP
    2. Design issues of original HTTP
  2. HTTP/1.0
    1. Background
    2. Description
    3. Performance problems
  3. HTTP/1.1
    1. Main features
  4. HTTP-NG
    1. Architecture
    2. Implementation
    3. Current Status
  5. S-HTTP
    1. Background
    2. Main features
  6. Protocol Extension Protocol (PEP)
    1. Background
    2. PEP model
    3. PEP usage
  7. Summary

References

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Copyright © 1996 Mir Farooq Ali, All Rights Reserved

Mir Farooq Ali <mfali@vt.edu>
Last modified: Sat Oct 26 13:26:39 1996