Welcome to Web Concepts!

The Web's Uniform Interface is based on a large and growing set of specifications. These specifications establish the shared concepts that everybody can build upon. One example for how this works is HTTP/1.1 Caching, which defines 5 HTTP Header Fields, 7 HTTP Warn Codes, and 12 HTTP Cache Directives.

Web Concepts is an overview of these concepts and of the specifications defining them. Web Concepts provides a structured and interlinked overview of the many concepts that together establish the Web surface.

The best way to explore Web Concepts is to use one of these starting points:

• Read the paper "Surfing the API Web: Web Concepts" published at the 27th International World Wide Web Conference (WWW2018)
• Explore the Concepts, currently listing 837 values for 35 Web Concepts (JSON)
• Explore the Specifications, currently listing 311 specifications in 7 specification series (JSON)

Web Concepts is openly managed on GitHub; feel free to fork, contribute, comment, or raise issues. The site is generated from structured information representing the individual specifications, with the build process currently being based on XSLT and Jekyll. If you are just interested in the data, read about the JSON representations of Web Concepts.

Recent Updates

• Jan 26, 2024: Adding Webhooks HTTP header fields
• Jan 30, 2021: Finally: HTTPS Upgrade for Web Concepts
• Jun 3, 2019: Wanted: Web Concepts Representation
• May 9, 2018: Web Concepts at Craft 2018
• Apr 26, 2018: Web Concepts at WWW2018

For a complete list, here is the history of all updates; you can subscribe to updates via the feed.