Chapter 17. HTTP

“The dream behind the Web is of a common information space in which we communicate by sharing information. Its universality is essential: the fact that a hypertext link can point to anything, be it personal, local or global, be it draft or highly polished.”

—Tim Berners-Lee, The World Wide Web: A very short personal history

The Hypertext Transfer Protocol, already mentioned in Chapter 12, is the mechanism through which data is requested and provided on the World Wide Web. This chapter describes the protocol in more detail and explains the way browser JavaScript has access to it.

The Protocol

If you type eloquentjavascript.net/17_http.html into your browser’s address bar, the browser first looks up the address of the server ...

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