HTTP (Hypertext Transfer Protocol)

The first documented version of HTTP was HTTP V0.9 (1991).

Dave Raggett led the HTTP Working Group (HTTP WG) in 1995 and wanted to expand the protocol with extended operations, extended negotiation, richer meta-information, tied with a security protocol which became more efficient by adding additional methods and header fields.
RFC 1945 officially introduced and recognized HTTP V1.0 in 1996.

The HTTP/1.1 standard as defined in RFC 2068 was officially released in January 1997. Improvements and updates to the HTTP/1.1 standard were released under RFC 2616 in June 1999.

In HTTP/0.9 and 1.0, the connection is closed after a single request/response pair. In HTTP/1.1 a keep-alive-mechanism was introduced, where a connection could be reused for more than one request. Such persistent connections reduce request latency perceptibly, because the client does not need to re-negotiate the TCP 3-Way-Handshake connection after the first request has been sent. Another positive side effect is that in general the connection becomes faster with time due to TCP's slow-start-mechanism.

Roy Thomas Fielding (born 1965) is an American computer scientist,[1] one of the principal authors of the HTTP specification, an authority on computer network architecture and co-founder of the Apache HTTP Server project.

Fielding used REST to design HTTP 1.1 and Uniform Resource Identifiers (URI).