What I’ve missed from HTTP 1.1

Should I remember name of HTTP 1.1 RFC 2616 or RFC 2068 specification?

That describes HTTP-Messages: Request and Response.

GET, POST, PUT, DELETE, OPTIONS… Well, section 9 defines 3 more — HEAD, TRACE, CONNECT. But not PATCH, LINK, UNLINK methods, that presents only in 2068 version of the spec.

From section 10 we can retrieve information about response codes:

• 1xx — Informational — as example 100 Continue
• 2хх — Successful — as example 201 Created
• 3xx — Redirection — as example 301 Moved Permanently
• 4xx — Client Error — as example 401 Unauthorized
• 5xx — Server Error — as example 500 Internal Server Error

Section 14 informs us about 47 defined by the protocol headers:

Accept, Accept-Charset, Accept-Encoding, Accept-Language, Accept-Ranges, Age, Allow, Authorization, Cache-Control, Connection, Content-Encoding, Content-Language, Content-Length, Content-Location, Content-MD5, Content-Range, Content-Type, Date, ETag, Expect, Expires, From, Host, If-Match, If-Modified-Since, If-Non-Match, If-Range, If-Unmodified-Since, Last-Modified, Location, Max-Forwards, Pragma, Proxy-Authenticate, Proxy-Authorization, Range, Referer, Retry-After, Server, TE, Trailer, Transfer-Encoding, Upgrade, User-Agent, Vary, Via, Warning, WWW-Authenticate.

By adding headers and using response codes protocol implements Caching, Content Negotiation and Authorization.

Is it stateless? Yes, till we start use session and/or cookie mechanism.