Understanding HTTP
As you learned earlier, Web servers and browsers communicate using the Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP). The current version of HTTP (1.1) is described in RFC 2616. The purpose of HTTP is to support the transfer of HTML documents. HTTP is an application-level protocol. The HTTP client and server applications use the reliable TCP transport protocol to establish a connection.
HTTP has the following duties:
To establish a connection between the browser (the client) and the server
To negotiate settings and establish parameters for the session
To provide for the orderly transfer of HTML content
To close the connection with the server
Although the nature of Web communication has become extremely complex, most of that complexity relates ...
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