HTTP Specifications
The HTTP specification is maintained by W3C (World-wide Web Consortium) and available at http://www.w3.org/standards/techs/http. There are currently two versions of HTTP, namely, HTTP/1.0 and HTTP/1.1. The original version, HTTP/0.9 (1991), written by Tim Berners-Lee, is a simple protocol for transferring raw data across the Internet. HTTP/1.0 (1996) (defined in RFC 1945), improved the protocol by allowing MIME-like messages. HTTP/1.0 does not address the issues of proxies, caching, persistent connection, virtual hosts, and range download. These features were provided in HTTP/1.1 (1999) (defined in RFC 2616).
