More on the HTTP protocol


A couple of other commonly-used HTTP requests are:

HEAD object protocol

A HEAD request returns the response headers. This is often used to obtain time-stamp data in response headers that can be used by a client to determine whether it needs to fetch an updated object from the server.

POST object protocol

POST is used to upload data to a server, usually to an object like a CGI program that can process it. POST can accept arbitrary-sized data, whereas using arguments to GET are limited to the maximum size of an HTTP request.

HTTP/1.0 was somewhat inefficient, in that it required a separate TCP connection (and hence three-way opening and closing handshakes) for each new request. HTTP/1.1 allows persistent connections where multiple requests can be made serially on the same connection, which improves performance significantly.

The HTTP/1.1 protocol is defined in detail in RFC 2616. MIME, which was originally intended as a standard for encoding binary attachments in email but components of which are also used in HTTP and other protocols, is defined in RFC 2045 and RFC 2046.

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Steve VanDevender
Last modified: Thu Jul 17 12:31:55 PDT 2003