begin quote from:
- The Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP) is an application protocol for distributed, collaborative, and hypermedia information systems. HTTP is the...
Hypertext Transfer Protocol
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
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begin quote from:
- The Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP) is an application protocol for distributed, collaborative, and hypermedia information systems. HTTP is the...
Hypertext Transfer Protocol
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
|This article needs additional citations for verification. (August 2016) (Learn how and when to remove this template message)|
|Internet protocol suite|
Hypertext is structured text that uses logical links (hyperlinks) between nodes containing text. HTTP is the protocol to exchange or transfer hypertext.
Development of HTTP was initiated by Tim Berners-Lee at CERN in 1989. Standards development of HTTP was coordinated by the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) and the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), culminating in the publication of a series of Requests for Comments (RFCs). The first definition of HTTP/1.1, the version of HTTP in common use, occurred in RFC 2068 in 1997, although this was obsoleted by RFC 2616 in 1999 and then again by RFC 7230 and family in 2014.
A later version, the successor HTTP/2, was standardized in 2015, and is now supported by major web servers.
- 1 Technical overview
- 2 History
- 3 HTTP session
- 4 HTTP authentication
- 5 Request methods
- 6 Status codes
- 7 Persistent connections
- 8 HTTP session state
- 9 Encrypted connections
- 10 Message format
- 11 Similar protocols
- 12 See also
- 13 Notes
- 14 References
- 15 External links
A web browser is an example of a user agent (UA). Other types of user agent include the indexing software used by search providers (web crawlers), voice browsers, mobile apps, and other software that accesses, consumes, or displays web content.
HTTP is designed to permit intermediate network elements to improve or enable communications between clients and servers. High-traffic websites often benefit from web cache servers that deliver content on behalf of upstream servers to improve response time. Web browsers cache previously accessed web resources and reuse them when possible to reduce network traffic. HTTP proxy servers at private network boundaries can facilitate communication for clients without a globally routable address, by relaying messages with external servers.
HTTP is an application layer protocol designed within the framework of the Internet protocol suite. Its definition presumes an underlying and reliable transport layer protocol, and Transmission Control Protocol (TCP) is commonly used. However HTTP can be adapted to use unreliable protocols such as the User Datagram Protocol (UDP), for example in HTTPU and Simple Service Discovery Protocol (SSDP).
HTTP resources are identified and located on the network by Uniform Resource Locators (URLs), using the Uniform Resource Identifiers (URI's) schemes http and https. URIs and hyperlinks in HTML documents form inter-linked hypertext documents.
HTTP/1.1 is a revision of the original HTTP (HTTP/1.0). In HTTP/1.0 a separate connection to the same server is made for every resource request. HTTP/1.1 can reuse a connection multiple times to download images, scripts, stylesheets, etc after the page has been delivered. HTTP/1.1 communications therefore experience less latency as the establishment of TCP connections presents considerable overhead.
The first documented version of HTTP was HTTP V0.9 (1991). Dave Raggett led the HTTP Working Group (HTTP WG) in 1995 and wanted to expand the protocol with extended operations, extended negotiation, richer meta-information, tied with a security protocol which became more efficient by adding additional methods and header fields. RFC 1945 officially introduced and recognized HTTP V1.0 in 1996.
The HTTP WG planned to publish new standards in December 1995 and the support for pre-standard HTTP/1.1 based on the then developing RFC 2068 (called HTTP-NG) was rapidly adopted by the major browser developers in early 1996. By March 1996, pre-standard HTTP/1.1 was supported in Arena, Netscape 2.0, Netscape Navigator Gold 2.01, Mosaic 2.7, Lynx 2.5, and in Internet Explorer 2.0. End-user adoption of the new browsers was rapid. In March 1996, one web hosting company reported that over 40% of browsers in use on the Internet were HTTP 1.1 compliant. That same web hosting company reported that by June 1996, 65% of all browsers accessing their servers were HTTP/1.1 compliant. The HTTP/1.1 stand