HTTP Protocol Overview

HTTP (Hypertext Transfer Protocol) is the foundational protocol used for transferring data on the web. It defines how clients (such as web browsers) and servers communicate with each other. Below is a brief overview of the HTTP protocol.

Key Components

Client: The client, typically a web browser, sends requests to the server.
Server: The server processes the requests and sends back responses.
Request: A request from the client to the server, which includes the HTTP method (GET, POST, etc.), the URL, and other headers.
Response: The server's response to the client's request, which includes the status code, headers, and the requested data.

HTTP Methods

GET: Retrieve data from the server.
POST: Send data to the server to create or update a resource.
PUT: Update a resource on the server.
DELETE: Remove a resource from the server.
HEAD: Retrieve headers from the server without the body.

Status Codes

1xx: Informational responses.
2xx: Successful responses.
3xx: Redirection.
4xx: Client errors.
5xx: Server errors.

Example

Here's a simple example of an HTTP GET request:

GET /en/protocol/http HTTP/1.1
Host: www.example.com
User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64)
Accept: text/html,application/xhtml+xml,application/xml;q=0.9,image/webp,*/*;q=0.8
Accept-Language: en-US,en;q=0.5

And a corresponding HTTP response:

HTTP/1.1 200 OK
Content-Type: text/html; charset=UTF-8
Content-Length: 345
Server: Apache/2.4.7 (Ubuntu)

For more detailed information, you can refer to our HTTP Protocol Guide.

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