He is a person that helped to write (HTTP) as the first web servers, that sent documents across the internet… and then he did a ton of research explaining why the web works the way it does. His name is on the specification for the protocol that is used to get pages from servers to your browser.
Because they weren’t designed to be used like that. When Fielding and his colleagues started building the web, being able to talk to any machine anywhere in the world was a primary concern. But most of the techniques developers later used to get computers to talk to each other didn’t have those requirements.
“http” like the beginning of what we type into the browser. Because it is capable of describing the location of something anywhere in the world from anywhere in the world. It’s the foundation of the web. The whole world wide web is built on an architectural style called “REST”. REST provides a definition of a “resource”, which is what those things point to.
The web page just specifies the URLs to the images and the browser goes and does more GETs using the HTTP protocol on them until all the resources are obtained and the web page is displayed. But the important thing here is that very different kinds of nouns can be treated the same. Whether the noun is an image, text, video, an mp3, a slideshow, whatever.
POST is used by HTTP to add something from one system to another system
PUT is used by HTTP to help a system wants to replace something in another system
PATCH is used by HTTP to help a system to do a partial update. The only thing left to figure out is what the data models should look like.