• IETF 117 Highlights

    IETF 117 is a few weeks behind us and Dhruv Dhody, IAB Member and liaison to the IESG, took the opportunity to report on a few highlights and some impressions.

    • Dhruv DhodyIAB Member and liaison to the IESG
    21 Aug 2023

  • Proposed response to meeting venue consultations and the complex issues raised

    The IETF Administration LLC recently sought feedback from the community on the possibility of holding an IETF Meeting in the cities of Beijing, Istanbul, Kuala Lumpur and Shenzhen, with received feedback including views that were well expressed and well argued but strongly conflicting. The IETF LLC has considered this feedback in-depth and now seeks community feedback on its proposed response.

    • Jay DaleyIETF Executive Director
    21 Aug 2023

  • Submit Birds of a Feather session proposals for IETF 118

    Now's the time to submit Birds of a Feather session (BOFs) ideas for the IETF 118 meeting 4-10 November 2023, with proposals due by 8 September.

      16 Aug 2023

    • Applied Networking Research Workshop 2023 Review

      More than 250 participants gathered online and in person for ANRW 2023, the academic workshop that provides a forum for researchers, vendors, network operators, and the Internet standards community to present and discuss emerging results in applied networking research.

      • Maria ApostolakiANRW Program co-chair
      • Francis YanANRW Program co-chair
      16 Aug 2023

    • IETF 117 post-meeting survey

      IETF 117 San Francisco was held 22-28 July 2023 and the results of the post-meeting survey are now available on a web-based interactive dashboard.

      • Jay DaleyIETF Executive Director
      11 Aug 2023
    • Show all

    Filter by topic and date

    Filter by topic and date

    HTTP/2 Approved

    • Mark NottinghamHTTPBIS Working Group Chair
    • Barry LeibaApplications Area Director

    18 Feb 2015

    After more than two years of discussion, over 200 design issues, 17 drafts, and 30 implementations, the HTTP/2 and HPACK specifications have now been approved by the IETF’s steering group for publication as standards-track RFCs.

    The result is that HTTP/2 will help provide faster user experience for browsing, reduce the amount of bandwidth required, and make the use of secure connections easier.

    The HTTP Working Group began work on HTTP/2 in 2012 by selecting Google’s SPDY protocol as the starting point, holding a series of six interim meetings to incorporate community feedback. This resulted in substantial changes to the format of the protocol, its compression scheme, and its mapping to the semantics of HTTP.

    The resulting protocol is designed to allow a seamless switch between HTTP/1 and HTTP/2, with minimal changes to applications and APIs, while at the same time offering improved performance and better use of network resources. Web users largely will be able to benefit from the improvements offered by HTTP/2 without having to do anything different.

    A key point in the protocol development process was the iteration the working group did between protocol updates, and implementations and testing. Certain draft protocol versions were labelled by the working group as “implementation drafts”, and the participants — many web browser and web server providers — updated their implementations and tested out the protocol changes. Most of the interim meetings included part of a day spent on hands-on interoperability testing and discussion. The result is a thoroughly validated protocol that has been shown to interoperate and that meets the needs of many major stakeholders.

    The HTTP/2 work specifically embodies the key IETF tenet about the value of “rough consensus and running code.”

    See the HTTP/2 home page, Frequently Asked Questions list (FAQ), and the chair’s blog article for more information. The specifications themselves are available here for HTTP/2 and HPACK.

    Share this page