The Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) kicks off work on the next generation of HTTP-- HTTP/2.0, a necessary upgrade on a world wide web handling increasingly complex, bandwidth-hungry applications.
The announcement comes through the Twitter feed of IETF Hypertext Transfer Protocol working group chairman Mark Nottingham, who says "It's official: We're working on HTTP/2.0."
The Hypertext Transfer Protocol currently stands at HTTP/1.1. It is in need of an upgrade-- HTTP was designed for simple and relatively small, static documents, whereas today the internet handles applications and bandwidth-intensive multimedia content.
Thus HTTP/2.0 needs to reduce latencies and streamline the transmission of content from servers to browsers, all while remaining both compatible with HTTP/1.1 and open for potential future upgrades.
The Google-developed IETF standard SPDY protocol will be the bases for the updated protocol. TCP (Transmission Control Protocol) will remain, although the working group might replace other transport mechanisms.
Working on the 2nd version of HTTP is long work-- the group should submit the HTTP/2.0 proposal (dubbed draft-ietf-httpbis-http2-00) by 2014, with Julian Reschkeof, Alexey Melnikov and Martin Thomson serving as editors. In the meantime the group will continue refining HTTP/1.1, the backbone of the entire internet as we know it.