Lecture 2: A Network Architecture Example

The HTTP Protocol

Once the two application processes have an established connection between them, they can communicate reliably.

The browser then sends a request, in ordinary, plain old ASCII text, to the server process thus:

GET /home.html

The string "GET something" is one of many commands defined in the HyperText Transfer Protocol, HTTP^[2]. The server responds by returning the contents of the file /home.html, also in ordinary plain (ASCII) text.

Finally, the browser process interprets the HTML markup in the returned file, and displays it to the user.

^[2] for the pedantic: this request syntax is from HTTP 0.9, the original version of the protocol, which is no longer in common use. See later lectures for the "real" protocol.

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