HTTP: The Definitive Guide

Chapter 1. Overview of HTTP

The world's web browsers, servers, and related web applications all talk to each other through HTTP, the Hypertext Transfer Protocol. HTTP is the common language of the modern global Internet.

This chapter is a concise overview of HTTP. You'll see how web applications use HTTP to communicate, and you'll get a rough idea of how HTTP does its job. In particular, we talk about:

                How web clients and servers communicate

                Where resources (web content) come from

                How web transactions work

                The format of the messages used for HTTP communication

                The underlying TCP network transport

                The different variations of the HTTP protocol

                Some of the many HTTP architectural components installed around the Internet

We've got a lot of ground to cover, so let's get started on our tour of HTTP.