Understanding HTTP

As you learned earlier, web servers and browsers communicate using the Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP). HTTP (1.1) is described in RFC 2616, and later documents have extended HTTP functionality. The purpose of HTTP is to support the transfer of HTML documents. HTTP is an application-level protocol. The HTTP client and server applications use the reliable TCP transport protocol to establish a connection.

HTTP does the following:

  • Establishes a connection between the browser (the client) and the server

  • Negotiates settings and establish parameters for the session

  • Provides for the orderly transfer of HTML content

  • Closes the connection with the server

Although the nature of Web communication has become extremely complex, most of ...

Get Sams Teach Yourself TCP/IP in 24 Hours, Fourth Edition now with the O’Reilly learning platform.

O’Reilly members experience books, live events, courses curated by job role, and more from O’Reilly and nearly 200 top publishers.

Start your free trial