Introduction to the HTTP Protocol

The HyperText Transfer Protocol (HTTP) is the backbone of the World Wide Web. Developed in 1993 to support information exchange at CERN in Switzerland, it's a very simple protocol, involving no authentication and only a few possible client commands. It's optimized for the lightweight serving of small (several kilobytes at most) text files, in keeping with the original intent of HTTP as a means of disseminating interlinked informational pages in the newly developed markup language understood by HTTP browsers, known as the HyperText Markup Language, or HTML.

As you no doubt well know, the use of HTTP has expanded well beyond its original design specifications. It's now used for the transfer of large binary files, ...

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