The HTTP Standard, the language of web servers, was born humbly in 1990 as the hypertext transfer protocol. HTTP was basically just a few verbs—simple commands—that a browser said to a web server. The most essential of these were GET, which asks a server for information, and POST, which sends info back.
—WIRED, “Meet the Web’s Operating System: HTTP”
The Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP) is an application layer protocol in the Internet protocol suite model for distributed, collaborative, hypermedia information systems. 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 0.9.
HTTP/1 was finalized and fully documented (as version 1.0) in 1996. It evolved (as version 1.1) in 1997 and then its specifications were updated in 1999 and in 2014.
Its secure variant named HTTPS is used by more than 76% of websites.
HTTP/2 is a more efficient expression of HTTP’s semantics “on the wire”, and was published in 2015; it is used by more than 45% of websites; it is now supported by almost all web browsers (96% of users) and major web servers over Transport Layer Security (TLS) using an Application-Layer Protocol Negotiation (ALPN) extension where TLS 1.2 or newer is required.
HTTP/3 is the proposed successor to HTTP/2; it is used by more than 20% of websites; it is now supported by many web browsers (73% of users). HTTP/3 uses QUIC instead of TCP for the underlying transport protocol. Like HTTP/2, it does not obsolete previous major versions of the protocol. Support for HTTP/3 was added to Cloudflare and Google Chrome first, and is also enabled in Firefox.
—Wikipedia, “Hypertext Transfer Protocol“
The HTTP standard, the language of web servers, was born humbly in 1990 as the hypertext transfer protocol. HTTP was basically just a few verbs—simple commands—that a browser said to a web server. The most essential of these were GET, which asks a server for information, and POST, which sends info back.
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