Future of HTTP

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Mark Nottingham edited this page Jul 28, 2016 · 4 revisions

This is list of things that might be interesting to think about in the future regarding HTTP.

General Work

Things that generally need to be done.

Clear layering / modularity - esp. relation to transport
Web browsing focus? Other use cases? E.g., IoT?
- Browser Profile for HTTP
- Other profiles? E.g., IoT, app
Energy efficiency
Browser APIs

H2Q

A straight mapping of HTTP/2 semantics to QUIC

UDP
Out of order delivery
Path to application / application path metadata?
Up-front routing information
Mobility (client and server)
Taking advantage of multi path
0RT

H2Q Extensions?

FEC???!?
Unreliable (as a feature)

HTTP/3

A future backwards-incompatible revision to HTTP

Semantic backwards compatibility - how much can we break?
Firm limits on protocol elements (sizes, etc.)
Data-aware header encoding
Security / encryption requirements
Multiple metadata buckets / labels
Push as an extension?
Binary encoding of headers w/ data type awareness
EXTENDED_SETTINGS

SciFi, Ponies and Rainbows

Things that are attractive, but hard to achieve

Taking advantage of multicast
Peer-to-peer / distributed HTTP / content-centric networking / NDN
Resistance to traffic analysis
Built-in onion routing (lite?)
Selective encryption
Anti-Censorship
Cross-Stream compression

HTTP/2 Extensions

HTTP/2-specific extensions

Priority improvements / modifications
websockets
PUSH for pub/sub and store-forward
Pushing DNS / certs
BLOCKED frame
PUSH hints?

HTTP/* Extensions

Generic HTTP extensions that aren't specific to any particular version

Blind Caching
Conditional-on-hash
replacement for content-md5 (use cases?)
Multipart-range response media type replacement
zero knowledge proof
prioritisation hints - visibility, controls
partial upload
"delayed" requests - how long has been stored/in transit - including error responce semantics
High precision timestamps (in caching)