Mark Nottingham. the current chair the IETF HTTP Working Group and member of the W3C TAG blogged on February 18, 2015 that 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.
This is a big deal in the HTTP world. New Zealand-based reporter for The Next Web, Owen Williams, noted “it’s the next big version of the Hypertext Transfer Protocol, marking the largest change since 1999 when HTTP 1.1 was adopted.”
HTTP/2 will offer a myriad of improvements that will offer noticeably faster page load times while also reducing errors and other issues. Test servers are available for folk to test HTTP/2 on a number of browsers including Firefox and Chrome, although at such an early stage, such access is only really useful to those working in Web development.
In particular, HTTP/2 uses “header field compression” and “multiplexing” to let browsers make multiple requests to web servers via a single connection.
“HTTP/2 uses multiplexing to allow many messages to be interleaved together on a connection at the same time, so that one large response (or one that takes a long time for the server to think about) doesn’t block others,” Nottingham said.
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