ietf

PARIS--Engineers have begun taking the first big steps in overhauling Hypertext Transfer Protocol, a seminal standard at the most foundational level of the Web.

At a meeting of the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) here yesterday, the working group overseeing HTTP formally opened a dicussion about how to make the technology faster. That discussion included presentations about four specific proposals for HTTP 2.0, including SPDY, developed at Google and already used in the real world, and HTTP Speed+Mobility, developed at Microsoft and revealed Wednesday.

There are some differences in the HTTP 2.0 proposals that have emerged so … Read more

Apparently Microsoft isn't content leaving one potentially important speed boost for the Web to Google.

The company last night announced a plan to improve HTTP -- the Hypertext Transfer Protocol that browsers use to request Web pages and servers use to deliver them -- with a technology it calls HTTP Speed+Mobility. Google has proposed an idea called SPDY for speeding up HTTP and won an important ally at IETF, the group that oversees the standard and that's beginning work on a new HTTP 2.0.

But Microsoft wants a piece of the action, too. It thinks SPDY … Read more

After a security problem derailed it last year, a technology to open a high-speed browser communications link is getting back on track again.

The technology, called WebSocket, is good for Web sites that involve time-sensitive communications--multiplayer games or real-time trading, for example. A security issue raised concerns about WebSocket led to reworking of the technology, but now supporters think they've fixed WebSocket.

"It seems like it will happen very soon," said Brian Albers, vice president of development at Kaazing, which commercializes Web Sockets. "There's a meeting of the IETF at the end of the month … Read more

The VP8 encoding technology at the heart of Google's effort to spread royalty-free video across the computing industry now has a home at the Internet Engineering Task Force--but not so Google can standardize it.

VP8 is a Google codec used to convert video into a more compact form for tasks such as streaming across the Internet, broadcast over the airwaves, or storage on a camera. VP8 and the Vorbis audio codec are the basis for WebM, an open-source and royalty-free technology that Google hopes will lower barriers for using video on the Net and elsewhere. Although WebM's open-source, royalty-free nature … Read more

The head of the Internet's leading standards body said Thursday that it is "misleading" for AT&T to claim that its push to charge customers for high-priority service is technically justified.

Internet Engineering Task Force chairman Russ Housley told CNET that AT&T's arguments to federal regulators, which cited networking standards to justify "paid prioritization" of network traffic, were invalid.

"AT&T in their letter (to the Federal Communications Commission) says the IETF envisioned this," Housley said. "That's not my view."

This particular debate began earlier … Read more

Google and other companies interested in the Internet's addressing system have proposed a technology they hope will get Net users to nearby servers more quickly.

The technology in question is called the Domain Name System, which resolves alphabetical Net addresses such as CNET.com to the numeric addresses actually used to reach the appropriate server. Google's interest in DNS is so strong the company launched its own service in an effort to lower some of the delays that can result when the network equipment most proximate to a Net user doesn't have the numeric address for a … Read more