Outline of Initial Design of the Structured Hypertext Transfer Protocol

This paper presents an introduction to the initial design of the Structured Hypertext Transfer Protocol (STTP), a compatible extension to the HTTP. It includes a new message set for the control of resource transmission, and the Structured Hypertext Markup Language (STML) for describing the structural information of Web pages. Experimental tests show that STTP can be significantly faster than HTTP, with the improvement of transmission time being around 70% to 400% and the same magnitude of packet savings, which is among the best performance improvement ever reported. The paper discusses the basic idea and major design considerations of these components, as well as a few important issues in developing STTP servers and clients.