RFC 9110 HTTP Semantics, authored by Fielding, Nottingham, and Reschke, was just published. This is a great refreshing summary of what we learned about the web protocol evolving over three versions. As it states, the core semantics of HTTP did not change. That core and the ideas behind it were described by Fielding in his thesis, and known as REST.
The document is long, and I just went through it once. It is a great technical document in terms of precision and self-descriptive.
The Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP) is a family of stateless, application-level, request/response protocols that share a generic interface, extensible semantics, and self-descriptive messages to enable flexible interaction with network-based hypertext information systems.
What a precise description.
