A new version of the HTTP standard that promises to deliver Web pages to browsers faster has been formally approved, the first Internet protocol's first revision in 16 years.
The specifications for HTTP 2.0 have been formally approved, according to a blog post by Mark Nottingham, who as chairman of the IETF HTTPBIS Working Group serves as the standard effort's leader. The specifications will go through a last formality -- the Request for Comment documenting and editorial processes -- then published, Nottingham wrote.
HTTP, short for Hypertext Transfer Protocol, is one of the seminal standards of the Web. It governs how a Web browser communicates with a Web server to load a Web page. HTTP 2.0, the protocol's first major revision since HTTP 1.1 in 1999, is designed to load Web pages faster, allowing consumers to read more pages, buy more things and perform more and faster Internet searches.
