21.2. Simple HTTP Transactions

Web application development requires a basic understanding of networking and the World Wide Web. In this section, we discuss the Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP) and what occurs behind the scenes when a browser displays a Web page. HTTP specifies a set of methods and headers that allow clients and servers to interact and exchange information in a uniform and predictable manner.

In its simplest form, a Web page is nothing more than an XHTML document—a plain text file containing markup (i.e., tags) that indicate to a Web browser how to display and format the document’s information. For example, the XHTML markup

					<title>My Web Page</title>
				

indicates that the browser should display the text between the <title>

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