The HTTP Conversation

In Hour 21, “Introduction to CGI,” you learned about the basic conversation between the web browser (Netscape, Internet Explorer, and so on) and the web server (Apache, IIS, and so on). The discussion in that hour was somewhat oversimplified. Now that you're more comfortable with CGI, it's probably a good time to take a closer look at this subject. Later in this hour, you'll learn some techniques for manipulating this conversation to perform some interesting tasks.

The conversation is described by a protocol known as the Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP). The two current versions of this standard are HTTP 1.0 and HTTP 1.1. For purposes of this discussion, either one is applicable.

By the Way

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