This working group addresses issues specific to intermediaries in
the World Wide Web infrastructure, providing generic mechanisms which
are useful in several application domains (proxies operated by access
providers, content delivery surrogates, etc).

Intermediaries are commonly deployed to help scale the WWW. Lack of
mechanisms to control and communicate with them brings about
scalability issues with intermediaries themselves, and lack of
strong, scalable coherence mechanisms limits their adoption by both
end users and content publishers.

Furthermore, access providers who wish to provision caching proxies
in their networks have no standardized mechanism to announce such
devices to user agents. As a result, many access providers resort to
the use of interception proxies, which break the end-to-end
relationship between client and server at the transport layer,
leading to undesired behaviors.

Accordingly, the group's work items are to:

1) Develop a resource update protocol.

2) Gather requirements for an intermediary discovery and description
   mechanism.

It is expected that after requirements for intermediary discovery
and description are gathered and evaluated, the working group will
re-charter to continue that work.

Issues pertaining to coordination between multiple administrative
domains are explicitly out of scope in this group's work items. Work
associated with the modification of messages by intermediaries is
also out of scope. Additionally, this group will only address
application-level (e.g., HTTP) intermediaries.