Protocol Action: 'Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP) Client-Initiated Content-Encoding' to Proposed Standard (draft-ietf-httpbis-cice-03.txt)

[The IESG <[e-mail]>]

The IESG has approved the following document:
- 'Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP) Client-Initiated Content-Encoding'
  (draft-ietf-httpbis-cice-03.txt) as Proposed Standard

This document is the product of the Hypertext Transfer Protocol Working
Group.

The IESG contact persons are Ben Campbell, Barry Leiba and Alissa Cooper.

A URL of this Internet Draft is:
https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/draft-ietf-httpbis-cice/




Technical Summary

In HTTP, content codings allow for payload encodings such as for
compression or integrity checks. In particular, the "gzip" content
coding is widely used for payload data sent in response messages.

Content codings can be used in request messages as well, however
discoverability is not on par with response messages. This document
extends the HTTP "Accept-Encoding" header field for use in responses, to
indicate that content codings are supported in requests.

Review and Consensus

This document was discussed at a few meetings, as well as on the list.
It was reviewed by a number of people, and a few different designs were
discussed early in its lifetime before we settled on the current design.

There is not currently any known implementation; this document is
"filling a hole" in HTTP, and we have seem some interest from
implementers and deployers of HTTP.

Personnel
Mark Nottingham is the document shepherd; Barry Leiba is the responsible
Area Director.