[mreithub]

Interesting...

I bet if we had used FTP instead of HTTP for serving HTML right from the start, FTP would today have all of the same extensions and the same people would argue for it being too bloated :) (HTTP started as pretty minimalistic protocol back in the day)

I often find the discrepancy between what HTTP has originally been designed for (serving static HTML pages) and all the different things it's being used for today highly amusing. Yes, some of todays applications for HTTP border on abuse, but its versatility (combined with its simplicity) fascinates me.

[kodfodrasz]

No, because FTP is stateful, thus it sould not have scaled well to many HTTP usecases of today, and something alse would have been born probably, to solve the problems with statelessness, which can be solved by statelessness.

The two success factors of http are statelessness and fixed verbs.