Outline of Initial Design of the Structured Hypertext Transfer Protocol

This paper presents an introduction tothe initial design of the Structured Hypertext Transfer Protocol (STTP), acompatible extension to the HTTP. It includes a new message set for thecontrol of resource transmission, and the Structured Hypertext MarkupLanguage (STML) for describing the structural information of Web pages.Experimental tests show that STTP can be significantly faster thanHTTP, with the improvement of transmission time being around 70% to400% and the same magnitude of packet savings, which is among the bestperformance improvement ever reported. The paper discusses the basicidea and major design considerations of these components, as well as afew important issues in developing STTP servers and clients.