Lecture 05 - Applications #3.1: HTML and HTTP Basics

Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP)

In Lecture #2,, the World Wide Web was used to illustrate the idea of a layered communications architecture. In that lecture, the basic ideas of the original version (0.9, circa 1992) of HTTP were introduced.

To revise, in HTTP/0.9 the GET operation was used to obtain HTML "pages" from a server, eg: the "home page" of ironbark at URL http://ironbark.bendigo.latrobe.edu.au/index.html

We first establish a reliable (TCP) connection to the server process waiting at port 80 (HTTP) on ironbark.bendigo.latrobe.edu.au. We then send the single line request shown in italics and receive in response the HTML text, shown here in boldface:

GET /index.html
<HTML>
<HEAD>
<TITLE>The Department of Information Technology at La Trobe University, Bendigo</TITLE>
</HEAD>
<BODY BGCOLOR="#FFFFFF">

<!-- ******** Department Header ***************-->
<IMG SRC="/gifs/irbkname.short.gif"  align="right" ALT="La Trobe University, Bendigo">
<font size="+2">La Trobe University, Bendigo</font>

    ..........etc

HTTP 0.9 actually defined a few other operations besides GET. However, since HTTP/1.0 (RFC 1945) and HTTP/1.1 are now commonly used, we shall defer discussion of them.

Lecture 05: Applications #3.1: HTML and HTTP Basics

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