10 Facts About HTTP

HTTP is the foundation of data communication for the World Wide Web, where hypertext documents include hyperlinks to other resources that the user can easily access, for example by a mouse click or by tapping the screen in a web browser.

Development of HTTP was initiated by Tim Berners-Lee at CERN in 1989 and summarized in a simple document describing the behavior of a client and a server using the first HTTP protocol version that was named 0.

Development of early HTTP Requests for Comments started a few years later and it was a coordinated effort by the Internet Engineering Task Force and the World Wide Web Consortium, with work later moving to the IETF.

HTTP is designed to permit intermediate network elements to improve or enable communications between clients and servers.

HTTP is an application layer protocol designed within the framework of the Internet protocol suite.

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HTTP is a stateless application-level protocol and it requires a reliable network transport connection to exchange data between client and server.

An HTTP server listening on that port accepts the connection and then waits for a client's request message.

HTTP provides multiple authentication schemes such as basic access authentication and digest access authentication which operate via a challenge–response mechanism whereby the server identifies and issues a challenge before serving the requested content.

HTTP provides a general framework for access control and authentication, via an extensible set of challenge–response authentication schemes, which can be used by a server to challenge a client request and by a client to provide authentication information.

HTTP defines methods to indicate the desired action to be performed on the identified resource.