Hi, I’m Mark Nottingham. I currently co-chair the IETF HTTP and QUIC Working Groups, and am a member of the Internet Architecture Board . I usually write here about the Web, protocol design, HTTP, and caching. Find out more .

HTTP/2 is Done

The IESG has formally approved the HTTP/2 and HPACK specifications, and they’re on their way to the RFC Editor, where they’ll soon be assigned RFC numbers, go through some editorial processes, and be published.

We should have an official entry about this up soon over at the IETF blog, but I want to recognise a few people specifically:

Mike Belshe and Roberto Peon brought SPDY to the IETF to standardise it. While a few have painted Google as forcing the protocol upon us, anyone who actually interacted with Mike and Roberto in the group knows that they came with the best of intent, patiently explaining the reasoning behind their design, taking in criticism, and working with everyone to evolve the protocol. Roberto also served alongside Herve Ruellan as editor of HPACK, after they merged their competing proposals for header compression.

Martin Thomson is a fantastic editor, and we couldn’t have had such a high-quality document (read the IESG reviews) without his tireless work.

Barry Leiba is our Area Director and supported this work within the IESG, doling out wisdom and advice to me along the way.

All of the implementers who attended interop events, and in particular the Japanese HTTP/2 community, whose contributions were of extremely high quality and consistency.

Everyone else who contributed on the mailing list, in pull requests and the issues, as well as in-person at our meetings.

Finally, a shout-out to Github, who gave us a great platform for building standards.

Thanks to everyone for your efforts, and for being such a professional yet fun, smart but humble group of people; it’s been a rare pleasure.

Stay tuned, the HTTP WG isn’t done yet.