I was joking about FTP. I was trying to say that HTTP has stood the test of time much better, despite the fact that what we have asked of it has changed quite a

I was joking about FTP. I was trying to say that HTTP has stood the test of time much better, despite the fact that what we have asked of it has changed quite a bit. > In 1995-1996, the formats and codecs were a bit more primitive, and the net was smaller, but it was the same sort of content: AVIs, MOVs, GIFs, JPGs, HTML, and early 1.0 JavaScript. There is a difference in magnitude between the present day web session and the typical 1995 one. The number of resources needed to properly render many pages is much, much larger. HTTP 1.0 and 1.1 simply weren't designed with this requirement in mind. They still do a pretty good job handling it, but it's not hard to argue that a protocol designed around improving parallelism will have better performance characteristics.