INTERNET-DRAFT                                        Paul Gauthier
   Expires: December 1999                          Inktomi Corporation
   Category: Standards Track                                Josh Cohen
   draft-ietf-wrec-wpad-01.txt                   Microsoft Corporation
                                                       Martin Dunsmuir
                                                    RealNetworks, Inc.
                                                       Charles Perkins
                                                Sun Microsystems, Inc.



                     Web Proxy Auto-Discovery Protocol

Status of This Memo

   This document is a submission by the WREC Working Group of the
   Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF).  Comments should be
   submitted to the wrec@cs.utk.edu mailing list.

   Distribution of this memo is unlimited.

   This document is an Internet-Draft and is in full conformance with
   all provisions of Section 10 of RFC2026. Internet-Drafts are working
   documents of the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF), its areas,
   and its working groups.  Note that other groups may also distribute
   working documents as Internet-Drafts.

   Internet-Drafts are draft documents valid for a maximum of six
   months and may be updated, replaced, or obsoleted by other documents
   at any time.  It is inappropriate to use Internet-Drafts as
   reference material or to cite them other than as "work in progress."

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          http://www.ietf.org/ietf/1id-abstracts.txt
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Abstract

   A mechanism is needed to permit web clients to locate nearby web
   proxy caches. Current best practice is for end users to hand
   configure their web client (i.e., browser) with the URL of an "auto
   configuration file". In large environments this presents a
   formidable support problem.  It would be much more manageable for
   the web client software to automatically learn the configuration
   information for its web proxy settings. This is typically referred
   to as a resource discovery problem.

   Web client implementers are faced with a dizzying array of resource
   discovery protocols at varying levels of implementation and
   deployment. This complexity is hampering deployment of a "web proxy
   auto-discovery "facility.  This document proposes a pragmatic
   approach to web proxy auto-discovery.  It draws on a number of
   proposed standards in the light of practical deployment concerns. It
   proposes an escalating strategy of resource discovery attempts in
   order to find a nearby web proxy server. It attempts to provide rich

   Gauthier, Cohen, Dunsmuir, Perkins                         [Page 1]

   INTERNET-DRAFT Web Proxy Auto-Discovery Protocol           7/28/99

   mechanisms for supporting a complex environment, which may contain
   multiple web proxy servers.

Table of Contents

Status of This Memo...................................................1
Abstract..............................................................1
Table of Contents.....................................................2
1.   Conventions used in this document................................2
2.   Introduction.....................................................2