The Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP) is an application protocol for distributed, collaborative, hypermedia information systems. HTTP is the foundation of data communication for the World Wide Web, where hypertext documents include hyperlinks to other resources that the user can easily access, for example by a mouse click or by tapping the screen in a web browser. HTTP/1.1 was first documented in RFC 2068 in 1997. That specification was obsoleted by RFC 2616 in 1999, which was likewise replaced by the RFC 7230 family of RFCs in 2014.