Hypertext Transport Protocol

(HTTP)
• HTTP is based on the request-response
communication model:
– Client sends a request
– Server sends a response
• HTTP is a stateless protocol:
– The protocol does not require the server to
remember anything about the client between
requests.

Jackson, Web Technologies: A Computer Science Perspective, © 2007 Prentice-Hall, Inc. All rights reserved. 0-13-185603-0
 HTTP
• Normally implemented over a TCP connection
(80 is standard port number for HTTP)
• Typical browser-server interaction:
– User enters Web address in browser
– Browser uses DNS to locate IP address
– Browser opens TCP connection to server
– Browser sends HTTP request over connection
– Server sends HTTP response to browser over
connection
– Browser displays body of response in the client area
of the browser window

Jackson, Web Technologies: A Computer Science Perspective, © 2007 Prentice-Hall, Inc. All rights reserved. 0-13-185603-0
 HTTP
• The information transmitted using HTTP is
often entirely text
• Can use the Internet’s Telnet protocol to
simulate browser request and view server
response

Jackson, Web Technologies: A Computer Science Perspective, © 2007 Prentice-Hall, Inc. All rights reserved. 0-13-185603-0
 HTTP

Connect { $ telnet www.example.org 80

Trying 192.0.34.166...
Connected to www.example.com
(192.0.34.166).
Escape character is ’^]’.
Send GET / HTTP/1.1
Request
{ Host: www.example.org

HTTP/1.1 200 OK
Receive
Response { Date: Thu, 09 Oct 2003 20:30:49 GMT
…

Jackson, Web Technologies: A Computer Science Perspective, © 2007 Prentice-Hall, Inc. All rights reserved. 0-13-185603-0
 HTTP Request
• Structure of the request:
– start line
– header field(s)
– blank line
– optional body

Jackson, Web Technologies: A Computer Science Perspective, © 2007 Prentice-Hall, Inc. All rights reserved. 0-13-185603-0
 HTTP Request
• Structure of the request:
– start line
– header field(s)
– blank line
– optional body

Jackson, Web Technologies: A Computer Science Perspective, © 2007 Prentice-Hall, Inc. All rights reserved. 0-13-185603-0
 HTTP Request
• Start line
– Example: GET / HTTP/1.1
• Three space-separated parts:
– HTTP request method
– Request-URI
– HTTP version

Jackson, Web Technologies: A Computer Science Perspective, © 2007 Prentice-Hall, Inc. All rights reserved. 0-13-185603-0
 HTTP Request
• Start line
– Example: GET / HTTP/1.1
• Three space-separated parts:
– HTTP request method
– Request-URI
– HTTP version
• We will cover 1.1, in which version part of start line
must be exactly as shown

Jackson, Web Technologies: A Computer Science Perspective, © 2007 Prentice-Hall, Inc. All rights reserved. 0-13-185603-0
 HTTP Request
• Start line
– Example: GET / HTTP/1.1
• Three space-separated parts:
– HTTP request method
– Request-URI
– HTTP version

Jackson, Web Technologies: A Computer Science Perspective, © 2007 Prentice-Hall, Inc. All rights reserved. 0-13-185603-0
 HTTP Request
• Uniform Resource Identifier (URI)
– Syntax: scheme : scheme-depend-part
• Ex: In http://www.example.com/
the scheme is http
– Request-URI is the portion of the requested
URI that follows the host name (which is
supplied by the required Host header field)
• Ex: / is Request-URI portion of
http://www.example.com/

Jackson, Web Technologies: A Computer Science Perspective, © 2007 Prentice-Hall, Inc. All rights reserved. 0-13-185603-0
 URI
• URI’s are of two types:
– Uniform Resource Name (URN)
• Can be used to identify resources with unique
names, such as books (which have unique ISBN’s)
• Scheme is urn
– Uniform Resource Locator (URL)
• Specifies location at which a resource can be
found
• In addition to http, some other URL schemes are
https, ftp, mailto, and file

Jackson, Web Technologies: A Computer Science Perspective, © 2007 Prentice-Hall, Inc. All rights reserved. 0-13-185603-0
 HTTP Request
• Start line
– Example: GET / HTTP/1.1
• Three space-separated parts:
– HTTP request method
– Request-URI
– HTTP version

Jackson, Web Technologies: A Computer Science Perspective, © 2007 Prentice-Hall, Inc. All rights reserved. 0-13-185603-0
 HTTP Request
• Common request methods:
– GET
• Used if link is clicked or address typed in browser
• No body in request with GET method
– POST
• Used when submit button is clicked on a form
• Form information contained in body of request
– HEAD
• Requests that only header fields (no body) be
returned in the response

Jackson, Web Technologies: A Computer Science Perspective, © 2007 Prentice-Hall, Inc. All rights reserved. 0-13-185603-0
 HTTP Request
• Structure of the request:
– start line
– header field(s)
– blank line
– optional body

Jackson, Web Technologies: A Computer Science Perspective, © 2007 Prentice-Hall, Inc. All rights reserved. 0-13-185603-0
 HTTP Request
• Header field structure:
– field name : field value
• Syntax
– Field name is not case sensitive
– Field value may continue on multiple lines by
starting continuation lines with white space
– Field values may contain MIME types, quality
values, and wildcard characters (*’s)

Jackson, Web Technologies: A Computer Science Perspective, © 2007 Prentice-Hall, Inc. All rights reserved. 0-13-185603-0
 Multipurpose Internet Mail
Extensions (MIME)
• Convention for specifying content type of a
message
– In HTTP, typically used to specify content type
of the body of the response
• MIME content type syntax:
– top-level type / subtype
• Examples: text/html, image/jpeg

Jackson, Web Technologies: A Computer Science Perspective, © 2007 Prentice-Hall, Inc. All rights reserved. 0-13-185603-0
 HTTP Quality Values and
Wildcards
• Example header field with quality values:
accept:
text/xml,text/html;q=0.9,
text/plain;q=0.8, image/jpeg,
image/gif;q=0.2,*/*;q=0.1
• Quality value applies to all preceding items
• Higher the value, higher the preference
• Note use of wildcards to specify quality 0.1
for any MIME type not specified earlier

Jackson, Web Technologies: A Computer Science Perspective, © 2007 Prentice-Hall, Inc. All rights reserved. 0-13-185603-0
 HTTP Request
• Common header fields:
– Host: host name from URL (required)
– User-Agent: type of browser sending request
– Accept: MIME types of acceptable documents
– Connection: value close tells server to close
connection after single request/response
– Content-Type: MIME type of (POST) body, normally
application/x-www-form-urlencoded
– Content-Length: bytes in body
– Referer: URL of document containing link that
supplied URI for this HTTP request

Jackson, Web Technologies: A Computer Science Perspective, © 2007 Prentice-Hall, Inc. All rights reserved. 0-13-185603-0
 HTTP Response
• Structure of the response:
– status line
– header field(s)
– blank line
– optional body

Jackson, Web Technologies: A Computer Science Perspective, © 2007 Prentice-Hall, Inc. All rights reserved. 0-13-185603-0
 HTTP Response
• Structure of the response:
– status line
– header field(s)
– blank line
– optional body

Jackson, Web Technologies: A Computer Science Perspective, © 2007 Prentice-Hall, Inc. All rights reserved. 0-13-185603-0
 HTTP Response
• Status line
– Example: HTTP/1.1 200 OK
• Three space-separated parts:
– HTTP version
– status code
– reason phrase (intended for human use)

Jackson, Web Technologies: A Computer Science Perspective, © 2007 Prentice-Hall, Inc. All rights reserved. 0-13-185603-0
 HTTP Response
• Status code
– Three-digit number
– First digit is class of the status code:
• 1=Informational
• 2=Success
• 3=Redirection (alternate URL is supplied)
• 4=Client Error
• 5=Server Error
– Other two digits provide additional information

Jackson, Web Technologies: A Computer Science Perspective, © 2007 Prentice-Hall, Inc. All rights reserved. 0-13-185603-0
 HTTP Response
• Structure of the response:
– status line
– header field(s)
– blank line
– optional body

Jackson, Web Technologies: A Computer Science Perspective, © 2007 Prentice-Hall, Inc. All rights reserved. 0-13-185603-0
 HTTP Response
• Common header fields:
– Connection, Content-Type, Content-Length
– Date: date and time at which response was generated
(required)
– Location: alternate URI if status is redirection
– Last-Modified: date and time the requested resource
was last modified on the server
– Expires: date and time after which the client’s copy of
the resource will be out-of-date
– ETag: a unique identifier for this version of the
requested resource (changes if resource changes)

Jackson, Web Technologies: A Computer Science Perspective, © 2007 Prentice-Hall, Inc. All rights reserved. 0-13-185603-0