Subject: HTTP Experiments: a bit of housekeeping (moving documents to Historic)

From: Mark Nottingham <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 1 Oct 2021 08:55:53 +1000

Hi everyone,

There are a number of HTTP-related documents in the RFC Series that are Experimental.[1] Experiments should end, and it would be good to reflect their status in the series if the overhead of doing so isn't too high.

Luckily, the IESG has a relatively lightweight procedure for moving a document to Historic.[2] A quick search[3] gives us a list to work with; I've grouped them into how I think they should be handled below.

I think the following Experimental RFCs can (and should) be changed to Historic status (with any registered protocol elements being deprecated or obsoleted, as per the registry's conventions):

- RFC2169: A Trivial Convention for using HTTP in URN Resolution
- RFC2296: HTTP Remote Variant Selection Algorithm -- RVSA/1.0
- RFC2310: The Safe Response Header Field
- RFC2660: The Secure HyperText Transfer Protocol
- RFC2774: An HTTP Extension Framework
- RFC8164: Opportunistic Security for HTTP/2

I'm not sure about the following documents, so I think the right thing to do is to leave them alone for now (unless someone else wants to argue to move them to Historic):

- RFC2295: Transparent Content Negotiation in HTTP
- RFC7486: HTTP Origin-Bound Authentication (HOBA)
- RFC7804: Salted Challenge Response HTTP Authentication Mechanism
- RFC8053: HTTP Authentication Extensions for Interactive Clients
- RFC8120: Mutual Authentication Protocol for HTTP
- RFC8121: Mutual Authentication Protocol for HTTP: Cryptographic Algorithms Based on the Key Agreement Mechanism 3 (KAM3)

Finally, I think the following experiments are still running, and so there should be no change in their status:

- RFC8297: An HTTP Status Code for Indicating Hints
- RFC8673: HTTP Random Access and Live Content
- RFC8942: HTTP Client Hints

What do folks think? If we can get quick agreement on these, we can ask our AD to start the process on these.

Cheers,

1. https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc2026.html#section-4.2.1
2. https://www.ietf.org/about/groups/iesg/statements/designating-rfcs-historic-2014-07-20/
3. https://rfc.fyi/?search=http&level=experimental

--
Mark Nottingham   https://www.mnot.net/