2. Resources

The target of an HTTP request is called a "resource". HTTP does not limit the nature of a resource; it merely defines an interface that might be used to interact with resources. Each resource is identified by a Uniform Resource Identifier (URI), as described in Section 2.7 of [RFC7230].

When a client constructs an HTTP/1.1 request message, it sends the target URI in one of various forms, as defined in Section 5.3 of [RFC7230]. When a request is received, the server reconstructs an effective request URI for the target resource (Section 5.5 of [RFC7230]).

One design goal of HTTP is to separate resource identification from request semantics, which is made possible by vesting the request semantics in the request method (Section 4) and a few request-modifying header fields (Section 5). If there is a conflict between the method semantics and any semantic implied by the URI itself, as described in Section 4.2.1, the method semantics take precedence.

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