Building blocks for HTTP APIs: IETF 109 Working Group Meeting

As discussed in a recent interview with Darrell Miller, one of the chairs of the new “Building Blocks for HTTP APIs” working group, this working group will be the first one explicitly addressing HTTP APIs within the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF).

It will be interesting to see what this working group is taking on in terms of work items. The first round of proposals was presented at the inaugural meeting of this working group at the IETF 109 event in November 2020.

Proposed Drafts for the HTTP APIs Working Group

The first draft that was proposed is “RateLimit Header Fields for HTTP” by Roberto Polli and Alejandro Martinez Ruiz. This document defines the RateLimit-Limit, RateLimit-Remaining, and RateLimit-Resetfields for HTTP, thus allowing servers to publish current request quotas and clients to shape their request policy and avoid being throttled out.

The following three drafts that were presented were all authored in collaboration with others, but in full disclosure, I certainly have a special interest in them because I contributed to them:

• “The Deprecation HTTP Header Field” (authored with Sanjay Dalal): It defines the HTTP Deprecation response header field that can be used to signal to consumers of a URI-identified resource that the resource has been deprecated. Additionally, thedeprecation link relation can be used to link to a resource that provides an additional context for the deprecation, and possible ways in which clients can find a replacement for the deprecated resource.

• “Linkset: Media Types and a Link Relation Type for Link Sets” (authored with Herbert Van de Sompel): This specification defines two document formats and respective media types for representing sets of links as stand-alone resources. One format is JSON-based and the other one is based on the syntax for representing links in the HTTP Link header field. The specification also introduces the linkset link relation type to support the discovery of sets of links.

• “Communicating Warning Information in HTTP APIs” (authored with André Cedik): This document defines a new HTTP fieldContent-Warning and a standard response format for representing warning information in HTTP APIs.

If you’re interested in a presentation of the drafts, here is a video of my presentation at the IETF 109 meeting. Additionally, if you’re interested in the feedback and discussions about the individual drafts, the HTTPAPI WG Meeting notes summarize everything that happened during the WG meeting.