Web Intermediaries (webi) ------------------------- Charter Last Modified: 02/21/2002 Current Status: Active Working Group Chair(s): Ian Cooper Mark Nottingham Applications Area Director(s): Ned Freed Patrik Faltstrom Applications Area Advisor: Patrik Faltstrom Mailing Lists: General Discussion:webi@equinix.com To Subscribe: webi-request@equinix.com In Body: (un)subscribe Archive: http://www.wrec.org/webi-archive/ Description of Working Group: This working group addresses issues specific to intermediaries in the World Wide Web infrastructure, providing generic mechanisms which are useful in several application domains (proxies operated by access providers, content delivery surrogates, etc). Intermediaries are commonly deployed to help scale the WWW. Lack of mechanisms to control and communicate with them brings about scalability issues with intermediaries themselves, and lack of strong, scalable coherence mechanisms limits their adoption by both end users and content publishers. Furthermore, access providers who wish to provision caching proxies in their networks have no standardized mechanism to announce such devices to user agents. As a result, many access providers resort to the use of interception proxies, which break the end-to-end relationship between client and server at the transport layer, leading to undesired behaviors. Accordingly, the group's work items are to: 1) Develop a resource update protocol. 2) Gather requirements for an intermediary discovery and description mechanism. It is expected that after requirements for intermediary discovery and description are gathered and evaluated, the working group will re-charter to continue that work. Issues pertaining to coordination between multiple administrative domains are explicitly out of scope in this group's work items. Work associated with the modification of messages by intermediaries is also out of scope. Additionally, this group will only address application-level (e.g., HTTP) intermediaries. Goals and Milestones: FEB 01 Submit Requirements for Resource Update Protocol as an Interne Draft MAR 01 Meet at Minneapolis IETF JUL 01 Submit Requirements for Intermediary Discovery and Description as an Internet-Draft AUG 01 Meet at London IETF NOV 01 Submit Resource Update Protocol as an Internet Draft DEC 01 Meet at Salt Lake City IETF FEB 02 Submit Resource Update Protocol to the IESG for consideration as standards-track publication Internet-Drafts: Posted Revised I-D Title ------ ------- -------------------------------------------- FEB 01 MAR 02 Requirements for a Resource Update Protocol Request For Comments: None to date.