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Analysis Of Hypertext Transfer Protocol, Http

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Hypertext Transfer Protocol, HTTP, is a primary standard which lays the foundation for which the World Wide Web is built upon. HTTP’s main purpose is to receive requests for and deliver content on the Web. The Internet Engineering Task Force’s, IETF, Request for Comments, RFC, 7230 describes HTTP as “.. a stateless application level protocol for distributed, collaborative, hypertext information systems.” (IETF 14). Overall it is essentially the main way of distributing web pages and is what the http in the url of links stands for. HTTP’s development began back in 1989 by a CERN, European Nuclear Research Organization, known as Tim Berners-Lee. Tim and his team had been developing a new markup language known as HTML, another protocol that …show more content…

The protocol may be used for other applications as long as it is supported by both the client and server. Typical connections work in a “response / response” format, where a client requests content from the server and the server responds. For example you may type http://www.google.com/ and request a webpage from the location google.com from a web server. The web server will see the request and check to see if it has a webpage for that location and then send you a request with either the content requests or an error code that let’s you know that it does not have what you have asked for. To the untrained eye, HTTP syntax may look rather complicated, but it is actually simple. There is a series of request messages and response messages between the server and client where request methods are sent and status codes are returned. A typical exchange has a client send a get method requesting content, specifying the location, and stating which version HTTP the client is supporting. The response from the server will return with what HTTP the server supports and a response code, which depends on where the request is reasonable, or in other words if it has the content the client requests. A rough example of this exchange is provided by the textbook, High Performance Browser Networking:
“GET /index.html HTTP/1.1 1
Host: website.org
User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10_7_4)... (snip)
Accept:

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