title: Why does the web need HTTP?
body: <p>No, wait. I'm being totally serious. When HTTP was invented, FTP already existed. Why couldn't FTP be the web's transport protocol?</p>
  
  <p>Sure, it has a lot of missing feautres, but most were added as an afterthought to HTTP and could be added to FTP too, such as caching, compression, virtual hosting.</p>
  
  <p>You could event think of a protocol like CGI that allowed to automatically generate FTP files (pages).</p>