Protocol Action: 'Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP/1.1): Conditional Requests' to Proposed Standard (draft-ietf-httpbis-p4-conditional-26.txt)

[The IESG <[e-mail]>]

The IESG has approved the following document:
- 'Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP/1.1): Conditional Requests'
  (draft-ietf-httpbis-p4-conditional-26.txt) as Proposed Standard

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

The IESG contact persons are Barry Leiba and Pete Resnick.

A URL of this Internet Draft is:
http://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/draft-ietf-httpbis-p4-conditional/




Technical Summary

The Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP) is an application-level protocol for
distributed, collaborative, hypertext information systems. This document
defines HTTP/1.1 conditional requests, including metadata header fields for
indicating state changes, request header fields for making preconditions on
such state, and rules for constructing the responses to a conditional request
when one or more preconditions evaluate to false.

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).


Personnel

Document Shepherd: Mark Nottingham 
Responsible Area Director: Barry Leiba