in 📓 Notes

HTTP

Table of Contents

1 min read

The Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP) is an Application Layer protocol.

Verbs

  • GET - request a document.
  • POST - update a document.
  • PUT - store a document.
  • DELETE - delete a document.
  • HEAD - request a document’s header.

Here’s a GET example:

GET /somedir/page.html HTTP/1.1
Host: tecnico.ulisboa.pt
Connection: close
User-agent: Mozilla/4.0
Accept-language: en

And a sample response:

HTTP/1.1 200 OK
Connection: close
Date: Thu, 03 Jul 2013 12:00:15 GMT
Server: Caddy
Last-Modified: Sun, 5 May 2013 09:23:24 GMT
Content-Length: 12234
Content-Type: text/html

<html>
  ...

HTTP 1.0

  • One TCP connection for each request.

HTTP 1.1

  • One TCP connection can make one or more requests.
  • Requests can have arbitrary size.
  • Blockage is still possible (Head of Line): replies arrive on the same order.

HTTP/2

  • Uses binary format instead of text. The headers and request verbs are the same, but they’re encoded differently in a more efficient manner.
  • Bidirectional data flux.
  • Streams!
Picture Henrique Dias

Or if you don't know what a response is, you can always write a webmention comment (you don't need to know what that is).