HTTP: The Definitive Guide

For More Information

For more information on entities and encodings, see:

http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc2616.txt

The HTTP/1.1 specification, RFC 2616, is the primary reference for entity body management and encodings.

http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc3229.txt

RFC 3229, “Delta Encoding in HTTP,” describes how delta encoding can be supported as an extension to HTTP/1.1.

Introduction to Data Compression

Khalid Sayood, Morgan Kaufmann Publishers. This book explains some of the compression algorithms supported by HTTP content encodings.

http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc1521.txt

RFC 1521, “Multipurpose Internet Mail Extensions, Part One: Mechanisms for Specifying and Describing the Format of Internet Message Bodies,” describes the format of MIME bodies. This reference material is useful because HTTP borrows heavily from MIME. In particular, this document is designed to provide facilities to include multiple objects in a single message, to represent body text in character sets other than US-ASCII, to represent formatted multi-font text messages, and to represent nontextual material such as images and audio fragments.

http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc2045.txt

RFC 2045, “Multipurpose Internet Mail Extensions, Part One: Format of Internet Message Bodies,” specifies the various headers used to describe the structure of MIME messages, many of which are similar or identical to HTTP.

http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc1864.txt

RFC 1864, “The Content-MD5 Header Field,” provides some historical detail about the behavior ...