The IESG has approved the following document: - 'Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP/1.1): Caching' (draft-ietf-httpbis-p6-cache-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-p6-cache/ Technical Summary This document specifies the caching semantics of HTTP messages and the conformance criteria for HTTP caches. The document seeks Proposed Standard status as it attempts to obsolete (along with the other draft-ietf-httpbis drafts) a previous standards track document (RFC2616) and was developed under the compatibility constraints of the working group charter. 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 Many of the experts in HTTP caching, representing some of the most widely used implementations, were active participants in the working group. Most of the discussions involved this core group of people, with additional reviews and contributions by other experienced practitioners and developers. Discussion was relatively moderate, with the number of issues raised being in the middle of the pack of the set of httpbis documents. The participants in the discussions tended to be the same core of caching experts, though with other experts in related topics, or those with valuable experience to share, commonly contributing. External reviews were not abundant, but due to the highly specific skill set required for a full review, and the fact that many of the people in industry with that skill set were participants in the working group, this shouldn't be considered either surprising or a problem. Only a small proportion of the issues required a prolonged discussion, but in each case, consensus was reached through reasoned arguments grounded in implementation experience using proposed text. I recall no case where consensus could even be considered "rough", as discussions were held back not primarily by strong disagreement, but by factors such as detailed wordsmithing of complex descriptions, or a lack of information with which a decision could be made (commonly, information about deployed implementation behaviour, or some aspect of the history of the protocol's development which needed to be unearthed). Issue 486[1] is a recent example of how some of the more complex discussions went. [1] http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/ietf-http-wg/2013JulSep/thread.html#msg1040 Personnel Document Shepherd: Mark Baker Responsible Area Director: Barry Leiba RFC Editor Note Please update the reference to RFC1305 to point instead to RFC5905
