page_title: Hypertext Transfer Protocol
section_title: History
hierarchical_section_title: Hypertext Transfer Protocol / History
caption_attribution_description: English: Tim Berners-Lee at Campus Party Brasil, 2009 Français&#160;: Tim Berners-Lee à la Campus Party Brasil, 2009
context_page_description: The Hypertext Transfer Protocol is an application protocol for distributed, collaborative, hypermedia information systems. HTTP is the foundation of data communication for the World Wide Web, where hypertext documents include hyperlinks to other resources that the user can easily access, for example by a mouse click or by tapping the screen in a web browser.
  Development of HTTP was initiated by Tim Berners-Lee at CERN in 1989. Development of early HTTP Requests for Comments was a coordinated effort by the Internet Engineering Task Force and the World Wide Web Consortium, with work later moving to the IETF.
  HTTP/1.1 was first documented in RFC 2068 in 1997. That specification was obsoleted by RFC 2616 in 1999, which was likewise replaced by the RFC 7230 family of RFCs in 2014.
  HTTP/2 is a more efficient expression of HTTP's semantics "on the wire", and was published in 2015; it is now supported by virtually all web browsers and major web servers over Transport Layer Security using an Application-Layer Protocol Negotiation extension where TLS 1.2 or newer is required.
context_section_description: The term hypertext was coined by Ted Nelson in 1965 in the Xanadu Project, which was in turn inspired by Vannevar Bush's 1930s vision of the microfilm-based information retrieval and management "memex" system described in his 1945 essay "As We May Think". Tim Berners-Lee and his team at CERN are credited with inventing the original HTTP, along with HTML and the associated technology for a web server and a text-based web browser. Berners-Lee first proposed the "WorldWideWeb" project in 1989—now known as the World Wide Web. The first version of the protocol had only one method, namely GET, which would request a page from a server. The response from the server was always an HTML page.
  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 WG planned to publish new standards in December 1995 and the support for pre-standard HTTP/1.1 based on the then developing RFC 2068 (called HTTP-NG) was rapidly adopted by the major browser developers in early 1996. End-user adoption of the new browsers was rapid. In March 1996, one web hosting company reported that over 40% of browsers in use on the Internet were HTTP 1.1 compliant. That same web hosting company reported that by June 1996, 65% of all browsers accessing their servers were HTTP/1.1 compliant. 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 2007, the HTTP Working Group was formed, in part, to revise and clarify the HTTP/1.1 specification. In June 2014, the WG released an updated six-part specification obsoleting RFC 2616:
  RFC 7230, HTTP/1.1: Message Syntax and Routing
  RFC 7231, HTTP/1.1: Semantics and Content
  RFC 7232, HTTP/1.1: Conditional Requests
  RFC 7233, HTTP/1.1: Range Requests
  RFC 7234, HTTP/1.1: Caching
  RFC 7235, HTTP/1.1: Authentication
  HTTP/2 was published as RFC 7540 in May 2015.
caption: Tim Berners-Lee
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