The world’s web browsers, servers, and related web applications all talk to each other through HTTP, the Hypertext Transfer Protocol. HTTP is the common language of the modern global Internet.
This chapter is a concise overview of HTTP. You’ll see how web applications use HTTP to communicate, and you’ll get a rough idea of how HTTP does its job. In particular, we talk about:
How web clients and servers communicate
Where resources (web content) come from
How web transactions work
The format of the messages used for HTTP communication
The underlying TCP network transport
The different variations of the HTTP protocol
Some of the many HTTP architectural components installed around the Internet
We’ve got a lot of ground to cover, so let’s get started on our tour of HTTP.
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