W3C HTTP

Classic HTTP Documents

These are some classic HTTP documents that show how HTTP has evolved since 1991

Simple Digest Security Scheme in 1995

An early version of a minimal security scheme for HTTP proposed by Phil Hallam-Baker. This scheme may be used as a direct replacement for the HTTP/1.0 Basic authentication scheme with minimal modification of clients and servers.

HTTP in 1992

The only documentation for early versions of the HTTP/1.0 protocol consisted of a discussion draft in HTML form, written by Tim Berners-Lee and later updated by Ari Luotonen and a host of characters on www-talk. This documentation is available for historical reasons only, since it has long since been replaced by the Internet Drafts, Informational RFC, and now Standard track documents, and does not reflect current practice among WWW applications.

HTTP in 1991

The original HTTP protocol did not use any resource metainformation and could be described in just a few pages. It was abandoned when it became clear that we wanted to serve more than just HTML on the Web.

HyperText Transfer Protocol Design Issues

Read the initial design issues behind HTTP from 1991 by Tim Berners-Lee.


Henrik Frystyk Nielsen,
@(#) $Id: Classic.html,v 1.5 1998/05/14 02:11:35 frystyk Exp $