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, HTTP is 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 (HTML).

Although originally not intended for this purpose, HTTP is now used for the transfer of large binary files, often including many inline images requested at ...

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