4.6. Summary

The Web is an application that runs on the Internet. It provides access to Web objects, which Web clients retrieve using objects' global names, called URLs. The two most important application-level protocols used by the Web are DNS and HTTP. DNS is used to provide hosts with human-readable names; it is used by many other Internet applications besides the Web. HTTP is specifically a Web protocol that Web clients use to talk to Web servers. In fact, Web servers are also known as HTTP servers. HTTP is a request-response protocol that runs on top of TCP. Two important performance optimizations are persistent connections, which allow multiple Web interactions to reuse the same TCP connection, and pipelining, which lets a client send a ...

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