

Can HTTP packets travel on UDP/IP? - known

And restrict HTTPS to TCP/IP
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toxik
Quote RFC 2616 (HTTP/1.1):

"HTTP communication usually takes place over TCP/IP connections. The default
port is TCP 80 [19], but other ports can be used. This does not preclude HTTP
from being implemented on top of any other protocol on the Internet, or on
other networks. HTTP only presumes a reliable transport; any protocol that
provides such guarantees can be used; the mapping of the HTTP/1.1 request and
response structures onto the transport data units of the protocol in question
is outside the scope of this specification."

So while it doesn't rule out protocols other than TCP, it does exclude UDP.

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tuukkah
You could do something like that, but it's hardly practical as the TCP
connection is the only state in HTTP and you'd have to implement something for
retransmissions anyway. As a special case, I see UPnP uses SOAP over HTTP over
UDP.

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jwilliams
Short answer is no.

HTTP assumes a guaranteed, in-order transport, which UDP does not give... If
you were to work around this, you'd basically end up with some kind of subset
of TCP anyway.

