I too miss the days where I could use "telnet 80" to interact with a web server. And when a website could be made by writing simple HTML/CSS code, and hosted a

I too miss the days where I could use "telnet 80" to interact with a web server. And when a website could be made by writing simple HTML/CSS code, and hosted anywhere, even by your own ISP. Yes, HTTP has become a monstrosity. Something that's incredibly hard to comprehend and implement. It just got even worse with HTTP/3 that replaces TCP with QUIC. On the other hand, HTTP has become a little bit more than just a protocol for serving web pages. It's become a universal transport protocol for everything: small content, very large content, interactive content, streamed content, public content, sensitive content, APIs, iOT... With being able to be a good fit for all these radically different use cases come a lot of complexity. It's a tradeoff. And HTTP is actually doing an amazing job at balancing complexity vs being a universal protocol.