The author of REST, Roy Fielding, feels that they're intertwined [1]: HTTP/1.1 is a specific architecture that, to the extent I succeeded in applying REST-base

The author of REST, Roy Fielding, feels that they're intertwined [1]: HTTP/1.1 is a specific architecture that, to the extent I succeeded in applying REST-based design, allows people to deploy RESTful network-based applications in a mostly efficient way, within the constraints imposed by legacy implementations. The design principles certainly predated HTTP, most of them were already applied to the HTTP/1.0 family, and I chose which constraints to apply during the pre-proposal process of HTTP/1.1, yet HTTP/1.1 was finished long before I had the available time to write down the entire model in a form that other people could understand. All of my products are developed iteratively, so what you see as a chicken and egg problem is more like a dinosaur-to-chicken evolution than anything so cut and dried as the conceptual form pre-existing the form. HTTP as we know it today is just as dependent on the conceptual notion of REST as the definition of REST is dependent on what I wanted HTTP to be today." [1] https://web.archive.org/web/20091111012314/http://tech.groups.yahoo.com/group/rest-discuss/message/6757 https://web.archive.org/web/20091111012314/http://tech.group...