1991

Why a new protocol?

Existing protocols cover a number of different tasks.

• Mail protocols allow the transfer of transient messages from a single author to a small number of recipients, at the request of the author.
• File transfer protocols allow the transfer of data at the request of either the sender or receiver, but allow little processing of the data at the responding side.
• News protocols allow the broadcast of transient data to a wide audience.
• Search and Retrieve protocols allow index searches to be made, and allow document access. Few exist: Z39.50 is one and could be extended for our needs.

The protocol we need for information access (HTTP) must provide

• A subset of the file transfer functionality
• The ability to request an index search
• Automatic format negotiation.
• The ability to refer the client to another server