The Web: The HTTP protocol

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HTTP (Hyper Text Transfer Protocol) is one of the application protocols of TCP/IP, the suite of protocols that powers the Internet. Let me fix that: it’s not one of the protocols, it’s the most successful and popular one, by all means. HTTP is what makes the World Wide Web work, giving browsers a language to communicate to remote servers that host web pages. HTTP was first standardized in 1991, as a result of the work that Tim Berners-Lee did at CERN, the European Center of Nuclear Research, since 1989. The goal was to allow researchers to easily exchange and interlink their papers. It was meant as a way for the scientific community to work better. Back then the internet main applications basically consisted in FTP (the File Transfer Protocol), Email and Usenet (newsgroups, today almost abandoned). In 1993 Mosaic, the first graphical web browser, was released, and things skyrocketed from there. The Web became the killer app of the Internet. Over time the Web and the ecosystem around it

By Flavio Copes Oct 4, 2018updated Jul 18, 2026 Learn how HTTP requests and responses power the web, including URLs, methods, headers, status codes, bodies, versions, HTTPS, and statelessness. ~~~ HTTP stands for Hypertext Transfer Protocol. It is the application-layer protocol browsers, servers, APIs, command-line clients, and intermediaries use to exchange messages on the web. A client sends a request. A server returns a response. HTTP transfers more than HTML. It carries JSON, images, video, fonts, form data, and any other representation described by its metadata. HTTP and HTTPS…

The Web: The HTTP protocol

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