HTTP 1.1 is an old protocol, over time new requirements made modifications necessary, some things fell out of use, and some changes turned out to be mistakes. T

HTTP 1.1 is an old protocol, over time new requirements made modifications necessary, some things fell out of use, and some changes turned out to be mistakes. That it's text-based without using doesn't help The basis is simple, but then add Cookies, HTTPS, Authentication, Redirecting, Host headers, caching, chunked encoding, WebDAV, CORS, etc etc. All justifiable but all adding complexity.