HTTP Authentication Extensions for Interactive Clients

This document specifies extensions for the HTTP authentication framework for interactive clients. Currently, fundamental features of HTTP-level authentication are insufficient for complex requirements of various Web-based applications. This forces these applications to implement their own authentication frameworks by means like HTML forms, which becomes one of the hurdles against introducing secure authentication mechanisms handled jointly by servers and user-agent. The extended framework fills gaps between Web application requirements and HTTP authentication provisions to solve the above problems, while maintaining compatibility with existing Web and non-Web uses of HTTP authentication.