It's perfectly normal (and allowed) for servers to send back a version string of "HTTP/1.1" even if the client sent the request as "HTTP/1.0". As long as they don't do anything in their response that assumes that the client has 1.1 features, all is fine. This basically just means: * Don't use chunked encoding in the response. (Technically a 1.0 client could specifically indicate support for that by sending a "TE: chunked" header, but since chunked encoding arrived at the same time as 1.1 I think most servers just assume that HTTP/1.0 clients never support it) * Don't assume that the client supports keep-alive connections. However, prior to HTTP/1.0 clients often did indicate that they could do keep-alive by sending "Connection: keep-alive". The only real difference in 1.1 is that now the client must support it unless they specifically indicate that they don't by sending "Connection: close". In the absence of a "Connection:" header, a 1.1 client supports keep-alive and a 1.0 does not.

Most well-behaved servers will only send chunked-encoding if the client claimed to be HTTP/1.1. If the client is HTTP/1.0 it will fall back to doing "Connection: close"

The only big thing chunked-encoding gives you is the ability to do a keep-alive connection when the server doesn't know the Content-Length in advance. (Technically it also added "trailers" for sending headers after the reply body, but that's little-used)