Subject: Protocol Action: Instance Digests in HTTP to Proposed Standard

From: The IESG <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 19 Nov 2001 17:55:26 -0500

The IESG has approved the Internet-Draft 'Instance Digests in HTTP'
<draft-mogul-http-digest-05.txt> as a Proposed Standard.  This has been
reviewed in the IETF but is not the product of an IETF Working Group.
The IESG contact persons are Patrik Faltstrom and Ned Freed.

Technical Summary
 
HTTP/1.1 defines a Content-MD5 header that allows a server
to include a digest of the response body.  However, this is
specifically defined to cover the body of the actual
message, not the contents of the full file (which might be
quite different, if the response is a Content-Range, or
uses a delta encoding).  Also, the Content-MD5 is limited
to one specific digest algorithm; other algorithms, such as
SHA-1, may be more appropriate in some circumstances.
Finally, HTTP/1.1 provides no explicit mechanism by which a
client may request a digest.  This document proposes HTTP
extensions that solve these problems.

Working Group Summary

This is an individual submission to the IETF, but, the
document has been discussed on various mailing lists
which have to do with the HTTP protocol.

Protocol Quality

The spec was reviewed by Patrik Faltstrom.