Chapter 7
What Is HTTP/2?
Section 4
HTTP/2 - What Is It?
HTTP/2 began as the SPDY protocol, developed primarily at Google with the intention of reducing webpage load latency using techniques such as compression, multiplexing, and prioritization. HTTP/ 1.1 and HTTP/2 share the same formats / semantics. This was done so that the requests and responses traveling between the server and client in both protocols reach their destinations as traditionally formatted messages (that is, with headers and bodies, using familiar methods such as GET and POST). While HTTP/1.1 transfers these in boring old plain-text messages, HTTP/2 encodes these into binary, allowing for a different delivery model. At a very high level, this allows HTTP/2 to encode requests/responses and cut them up into smaller packets of information, which is very powerful.