The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) has begun work on the development of a protocol to improve HTTP, the Web's foundation. The new protocol, tentatively called HTTP-ng, is to provide better use of network bandwidth and improve performance. One of the most important changes will be to avoid setting up a new connection each time a browser needs to retrieve an object from a Web server. HTTP-ng would address this issue by letting a single connection carry multiple requests.
Given the complex development and approval process, the new protocol is not likely to be implemented until 2002.
