Http was originally a document format and a file transfer protocol. The idea that it could be a dynamic page generation engine and eventually a working RPC mechanism (SOAP, REST, etc) came afterward.
HTTP today is very much different than when it was originally defined in 1991. >> From: Kent Borg <[email protected]> >> >> A system designed for hypertext has turned out to be the architecture >> for so much of modern life, but it wasn't designed for that. > > If you mean by "system", HTTP, it was always a client-server > request-response protocol, and it works rather well for that. Witness > that so very many things use it. > > The secret of its success is a bit subtle, I think. There have been > lots of protocols that do similar things, and many other protocols as > well. But many of them are brittle and high-overhead to use. As Scott > Adams once noted, there are millions of ways of configuring an ISDN > connection, and if the two ends aren't configured agreeably, the > connection doesn't work. > > Out of the early Internet came the realization that you can't afford to > have the people at each end configure things, the two systems need to > come to agreement between themselves. So over the years, the IETF > learned how to design protocols that have immense "upward > compatibility" -- a request may come with many bells and whistles, but > the server can safely ignore the embroidery it doesn't understand and > use the parts it does understand. > > So as all sorts of new features were larded into HTTP, if you put a > little care into it, you can use those features with your correspondents > who know them and still do business with those who don't. > > Dale > _______________________________________________ > Discuss mailing list > [email protected] > https://lists.blu.org/mailman/listinfo/discuss > _______________________________________________ Discuss mailing list [email protected] https://lists.blu.org/mailman/listinfo/discuss
