Speed Up Application Rendering with HTTP/2 Support

HTTP, which stands for Hypertext Transfer Protocol, is the mechanism used to request Web pages from a server and render them on a screen. HTTP/1.1, which is commonly used today, was made standard in 1999. Slowly but surely, we are now advancing to the HTT

Many of the websites today have servers that support HTTP protocols, which are based on standards that were released in 1999. The focus of Web browser and application developers, since then, has been on the various strategies that could be deployed to lay out the files on browsers in a better way for faster rendering and a more real-time experience. But the effort by Google (with SPDY) and its adoption by the IETF (Internet Engineering Task Force) to make it a standard with an RFC (Request for Comments), changed the way files are rendered to the browser from the Web server, speeding up application rendering substantially.

This article gives the history of the HTTP and the advantages of the newly released standard, HTTP/2, which is catching up because it ensures faster real-time rendering of data in the browsers.

A brief history of the HTTP standard

Tim Berners-Lee, considered the inventor of Web technologies, proposed the World Wide Web project in 1989 with his team at CERN. This involved a server that transported data over the TCP/IP and was called a Web server. This implemented one protocol action called ‘GET’, which indicated to the server that the ‘User Agent’, also called the ‘Browser’, had sent this request to get the data (Web page) referred by the parameter that it sent along with the request. The Web page that resides in a relative location inside the Web server requested is known as the URL (universal resource locator) that points to the simplified markup language based file, namely, the HTML file.

The Hypertext Markup Language (HTML) consists of identifiers (markups) that refer to various segments of the file (like the header, body and footer), the divisions inside these