Bingo. Also look at the handling of URIs (absolute or relative), encoding issues, and the mess that is the actual text format. HTTP's popularity outside of the

Bingo. Also look at the handling of URIs (absolute or relative), encoding issues, and the mess that is the actual text format. HTTP's popularity outside of the web is mainly cause it's easy to use as a simple wrapper around TCP with read and read/write semantics. Nearly all the rest of HTTP is unneeded fluff (proof: browsers didn't even do other methods besides GET/POST and applications were just fine).