CODEWITHSUNDEEP
httphttp-headersbrowser
mcarthurart
mcarthurart

Reputation: 109

Can a browser trying to render a webpage use both HTTP 1.0 and 1.1 when communicating with the same server?

After reading Steve Souders' 2008 blog post on HTTP connections per browser, it made me wonder if a browser can use both HTTP 1.0 and 1.1 when communicating with the same server while trying to render a webpage. I don't know a lot about the server technology involved or the HTTP specifications, so this question probably underscores my lack of understanding here.

Upvotes: 0

Views: 131

Answers (1)

Kornel
Kornel

Reputation: 100200

In theory, yes. HTTP connections are supposed to be stateless and independent, and a good server should accept any combination of requests.

For example UA (or proxy in front of it) could first try HTTP/1.0 to see what server it's talking to and then make subsequent requests using 1.1 (or try 1.1 first and downgrade to 1.0 on error).

In practice it's very unlikely, as none of popular UAs do anything like this, there's no reason to use HTTP/1.0 when 1.1 works, and true HTTP/1.0 is unusable on the web anyway ("1.0" in practice means 1.1 without chunked encoding and with connection:close by default).

In the context of the article: limit on number of connections is just a suggestion in the spec, and it's not enforced on protocol-level in any way. HTTP/1.1 clients routinely ignore that part of the spec without downgrading protocol version.

Upvotes: 1

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