HTTP has quietly evolved under every web request, from the one-line text protocol Tim Berners-Lee wrote in 1991 to QUIC-over-UDP in HTTP/3 today. Each version solved the previous one's pain: HTTP/1.0 added headers, HTTP/1.1 brought persistent connections and caching primitives like ETag and Cache-Control, HTTP/2 swapped plain text for a binary framing layer with multiplexing and HPACK compression.
The full post traces the lineage version by version — what shipped in each RFC, which headers mattered, and why HTTP/3 ditched TCP for QUIC to get faster handshakes, built-in encryption, and per-stream loss recovery that no longer blocks the whole connection on a single dropped packet.
Originally published at andreasbergstrom.dev — read the full post there.
Top comments (0)