State of the standards: HTTP

The Hypertext Transport Protocol defines the format of information on the World Wide Web and the method used for moving that information around. If you're frustrated by sluggish performance on the Internet, it's not just the increased traffic and the speed of your modem that's to blame. Part of the responsibility lies with the underlying HTTP standard.

The current version is 1.0, but there's a draft specification for version 1.1 which, once it's adopted and implemented, should help speed up the operation of the World Wide Web. You can find the official specifications and recommendations at www.w3.org/Protocols.

Think of a typical Web page: it contains the Web document itself and frequently one or more graphic images or other objects embedded in the Web page.

Under HTTP 1.0, your Web browser fetches the base document from the Web server, and then goes back and fetches each of the embedded objects separately. As most embedded objects are small and many pages feature one or two dozen such embedded objects, a sizeable proportion of your Web browser's time is spent sending and receiving 'control packets' which merely open and close the connection with the particular Web server where the page is located.

HTTP 1.1 uses a technique called 'persistent connections' to overcome this problem. Basically, HTTP 1.1 keeps the connection from your browser to the Web server open, letting you download a complete Web page in one fell swoop.

In addition, version 1.1 allows for compression of uncompressed documents before they're transferred to reduce transfer time. It also improves the use of caching to speed up data transfer.

by Rose Vines