When HTTP was created and thrown out into the world, it was probably perceived as a rather simple and straightforward protocol, but time has proved that to be false. HTTP 1.0 in RFC 1945 is a 60-page specification released in 1996. RFC 2616 that describes HTTP 1.1 was released only three years later in 1999 and had grown significantly to 176 pages. Yet when we within IETF worked on the update to that spec, it was split up and converted into six documents with a much larger page count in total (resulting in RFC 7230 and family). By any count, HTTP 1.1 is big and includes a myriad of details, subtleties and, not the least, a lot of optional parts.