HTTP Pocket Reference

Responses

Given a request like the one previously shown, the server looks for the server resource associated with “/” and returns it to the browser, preceding it with header information in its response. The resource associated with the URL depends on how the server is implemented. It could be a static file or it could be dynamically generated. In this case, the server returns:

HTTP/1.1 200 OK
Date: Mon, 06 Dec 1999 20:54:26 GMT
Server: Apache/1.3.6 (Unix)
Last-Modified: Fri, 04 Oct 1996 14:06:11 GMT
ETag: "2f5cd-964-381e1bd6"
Accept-Ranges: bytes
Content-length: 327
Connection: close
Content-type: text/html

<title>Sample Homepage</title>
<img src="/images/oreilly_mast.gif">
<h1>Welcome</h1>
Hi there, this is a simple web page.  Granted,
it may not be as elegant as some other web
pages you've seen on the net, but there are 
some common qualities:

<ul>
  <li> An image,
  <li> Text,
  <li> and a <a href="/example2.html"> hyperlink. </a>
</ul>

If you look at this response, you’ll see it begins with a series of lines that specify information about the document and about the server itself. After a blank line, it returns the document. Lines 2-9 are called the response header, and the part after the first blank line is called the body or entity, or entity-body. Let’s look at the header information:

1. The first line, HTTP/1.1 200 OK, tells the client what version of the HTTP protocol the server uses. But more importantly, by returning a status code of 200, it says that the document has been found and ...