The Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP) is an application-level
protocol for distributed, collaborative, hypermedia information
systems. It is a generic, stateless, protocol which can be used for
many tasks beyond its use for hypertext, such as name servers and
distributed object management systems, through extension of its
request methods, error codes and headers [47]. A feature of HTTP is
the typing and negotiation of data representation, allowing systems
to be built independently of the data being transferred.

HTTP has been in use by the World-Wide Web global information
initiative since 1990. This specification defines the protocol
referred to as “HTTP/1.1”, and is an update to RFC 2068 [33].