Subject: FYI: Formation of Web Intermediaries (webi) WG

From: "Jim Whitehead" <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 17 Jan 2001 16:47:33 -0800

http://www.ietf.org/mail-archive/ietf-announce/Current/msg10869.html

A new working group has been formed in the Applications Area of
the IETF. For additional information, contact the Area Directors
or the WG Chair.

Web Intermediaries (webi)
-------------------------
 
 Current Status: Active Working Group
 
 Chair(s):
     Ian Cooper <[email-masked]>
     Mark Nottingham <[email-masked]>
 
 Applications Area Director(s): 
     Ned Freed  <[email-masked]>
     Patrik Faltstrom  <[email-masked]>
 
 Applications Area Advisor: 
     Patrik Faltstrom  <[email-masked]>
 
 Mailing Lists: 
     General Discussion:[email-masked]
     To Subscribe:      [email-masked]
         In Body:       (un)subscribe
     Archive:           ftp://ftp.ietf.org/ietf-mail-archive/webi

Description of Working Group:
 
This working group will address specific issues in the world wide web
infrastructure (as identified by the WREC working group), by providing
generic mechanisms which are useful in several application domains 
(e.g., proxies, content delivery surrogates).

Work items for this group will be:

1) An invalidation protocol to provide a strong cache coherence 
   mechanism while avoiding the latency penalty of validation, usable
   in proxy as well as surrogate configurations.

2) An intermediate service discovery mechanism, consisting of:

   a) An intermediary service description format, which describes what
      services an intermediary or arbitrary group of intermediaries is
      willing to provide, and

   b) A discovery protocol for locating relevant service descriptions 
      within a single administrative domain.

   Both components will take into consideration current practice,
   related work in the IETF, and a reasoned set of requirements, which 
   will include the need to provide a reasonable alternative to 
   interception proxies.

Service discovery, and other issues pertaining to coordination between
multiple administrative domains are explicitly out of scope of this 
group.

Protocols associated with the provisioning of value added services,
including the vectoring of adaptation requests to other devices, are 
also out of scope for this group.

Finally, this group will only address application-level (e.g., HTTP)
intermediaries.