We are all very familiar with the term HTTP. We use it every day to access websites. HTTP stands for Hyper Text Transfer Protocol.
This is the protocol used by your web browsers (Firefox, Chrome, IE etc) to talk to ‘Web servers’ (Apache, IIS etc.)
When the HTTP protocol was used by Tim Berners-Lee, a British physicist, to get linked resources called hypertext documents, the World Wide Web was born. That was in 1990.
There are two major standards for HTTP, HTTP/1.0 & HTTP/1.1, developed by the World Wide Web Consortium and the Internet Engineering Task Force.
HTTP is a request/response standard.
In HTTP/1.0, a separate connection is used for every document recovered. It means that if you access a page with a lot of images, then each image is retrieved from the server using a separate HTTP connection. The process of establishing a new connection is time consuming.
In HTTP/1.1, the same connection may be used to download all the entities in a web page. It may therefore speed up the page load process.
For more information refer the World Wide Web Consortium website.