What can be controlled by HTTP

Web Development
#1

This extensible nature of HTTP has, over time, allowed for more control and functionality of the Web. Cache and authentication methods were functions handled early in HTTP history. The ability to relax the origin constraint, by contrast, was only added in the 2010s.

Here is a list of common features controllable with HTTP:

Caching How documents are cached can be controlled by HTTP. The server can instruct proxies and clients about what to cache and for how long. The client can instruct intermediate cache proxies to ignore the stored document.
Relaxing the origin constraint To prevent snooping and other privacy invasions, Web browsers enforce strict separation between Web sites. Only pages from the same origin can access all the information of a Web page. Though such a constraint is a burden to the server, HTTP headers can relax this strict separation on the server side, allowing a document to become a patchwork of information sourced from different domains; there could even be security-related reasons to do so.
Authentication Some pages may be protected so that only specific users can access them. Basic authentication may be provided by HTTP, either using the WWW-Authenticate and similar headers, or by setting a specific session using HTTP cookies.
Proxy and tunneling Servers or clients are often located on intranets and hide their true IP address from other computers. HTTP requests then go through proxies to cross this network barrier. Not all proxies are HTTP proxies. The SOCKS protocol, for example, operates at a lower level. Other protocols, like ftp, can be handled by these proxies.
Sessions Using HTTP cookies allows you to link requests with the state of the server. This creates sessions, despite basic HTTP being a state-less protocol. This is useful not only for e-commerce shopping baskets, but also for any site allowing user configuration of the output.