Once upon a time, the name may have sounded like a perfect choice. After all, the initial goal of HTTP was to transfer hypertext documents. These are documents that contain links to other documents.
However, developers soon realized that HTTP can also help transfer other content types, such as images and videos. Over the years, HTTP has become critical to the existence and growth of the web.
In today’s deep dive, we’ll unravel the evolution of HTTP, from its humble beginnings with HTTP1 to the latest advancements of HTTP2 and HTTP3. We’ll look at how each version addressed the limitations of its predecessor, improving performance, security, and user experience.
By the end of this article, you’ll have a solid understanding of the key differences between HTTP1, HTTP2, and HTTP3, helping you make informed decisions when designing web applications.
HTTP/1 was introduced in 1996. Before that, there was HTTP/0.9, a simple protocol that only supported the GET method and had no headers. Only HTML files were included in HTTP responses. There were no HTTP headers and no HTTP status codes.