[MichaelGG]

You say HTTP crippled TCP so as to not break-down REST. HTTP 1.0 does not seem to be designed for REST; it doesn't seem that REST was really published until quite a while later. Calling HTTP "REST-based" seems a bit of a stretch.

On top of that, could you give a few examples of what you actually mean? Like what would a partial update be?

TCP seems like a perfect fit for the underlying transport for a request/response model; I don't see how choosing it is some sort of deliberate "crippling". What should they have done? Built a custom request/response protocol on top of IP? Isn't that just crippling IP's flexibility as a layer 3 protocol? I don't understand your objections.

[strictfp]

Roy Fielding was involved in HTTP 1.0 and I believe that REST was a generalization of some of the principles used therein. I explained the breakdown in another comment, see http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4033717

[strictfp]

I'm not saying that TCP was a super-bad choice, just that they wanted only a subset of the features and got a bit more than they wanted. Also see http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4033822 .