The last day of this edition of the HTTP workshop. Thursday November 3, 2022. A half day only. Many participants at the Workshop are going to continue their UK adventure and attend the IETF 115 in London next week.

We started off the day with a deep dive into connection details. How to make connections for HTTP – in particular on mobile devices. How to decide which IP to use, racing connections, timeouts, when to consider a connection attempt “done” (ie after the TCP SYNACK or after the TLS handshake is complete). QUIC vs TCP vs TLS and early data. IPv4 vs IPv6.

ECH. On testing, how it might work, concerns. Statistics are lies. What is the success expectancy for this and what might be the explanations for failures. What tests should be done and what answers about ECH in the wild would we like to get answered going forward?

Dan Stahr: Making a HTTP client good. Discussions around what to expose, not to expose and how HTTP client APIs have been written or should be written. Adobe has its own version of fetch for server use.

Mike Bishop brought up an old favorite subject: a way for a server to provide hints to a client on how to get its content from another host. Is it time to revive this idea? Blind caching the idea and concept was called in an old IETF 95 presentation by Martin Thomson. A host that might be closer the client or faster etc or simply that has the content in question could be used for providing content.

Mark Nottingham addressed the topic of HTTP (interop) testing. Ideas were raised around some kind of generic infrastructure for doing tests for HTTP implementations. I think people were generally positive but I figure time will tell what if anything will actually happen with this.

What’s next for HTTP? Questions were asked to the room, mostly of the hypothetical kind, but I don’t think anyone actually had the nerve to suggest they actually have any clear ideas for that at this moment. At least not in this way. HTTP/4 has been mentioned several times during these days, but then almost always in a joke context.

The End

This is how the workshop ends for this time. Super fun, super informative, packed with information with awesome people. One of these events that give me motivation and a warm fuzzy feeling inside for an extended period of time into the future.

Thanks everyone for your excellence. Thank you organizers for a fine setup!