[Discuss] A Web Server is No Longer a Web Server

[markw at mohawksoft.com (markw at mohawksoft.com)]

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 <kentborg at borg.org>
>>
>> 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
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