Please Whitelist This Site? I know everyone hates ads. But please understand that I am providing premium content for free that takes hundreds of hours of time to research and write. I don't want to go to a pay-only model like some sites, but when more and more people block ads, I end up working for free. And I have a family to support, just like you. :) If you like The TCP/IP Guide, please consider the download version. It's priced very economically and you can read all of it in a convenient format without ads. If you want to use this site for free, I'd be grateful if you could add the site to the whitelist for Adblock. To do so, just open the Adblock menu and select "Disable on tcpipguide.com". Or go to the Tools menu and select "Adblock Plus Preferences...". Then click "Add Filter..." at the bottom, and add this string: "@@||tcpipguide.com^$document". Then just click OK. Thanks for your understanding! Sincerely, Charles Kozierok Author and Publisher, The TCP/IP Guide

NOTE: Using software to mass-download the site degrades the server and is prohibited. If you want to read The TCP/IP Guide offline, please consider licensing it. Thank you.

The TCP/IP Guide  9  TCP/IP Application Layer Protocols, Services and Applications (OSI Layers 5, 6 and 7)       9  TCP/IP Key Applications and Application Protocols            9  TCP/IP File and Message Transfer Applications and Protocols (FTP, TFTP, Electronic Mail, USENET, HTTP/WWW, Gopher)                 9  TCP/IP World Wide Web (WWW, "The Web") and the Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP)                      9  TCP/IP Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP)

TCP/IP Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP) 1 2 3 HTTP General Operation and Connections

The World Wide Web had humble beginnings, as a research project at the Swiss research institute, CERN. The primary goal of the project was to allow hypertext documents to be electronically linked, so selecting a reference in one document to a second one would cause it to be retrieved. To implement this system, some sort of mechanism was needed to allow a client computer to tell a server to send it a document. To fill this function, the early developers of the Web created a new TCP/IP application layer protocol: the Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP).

The original version of HTTP was intended only for the transfer of hypertext documents, and was designed to be very simple to make implementation of the fledgling Web easier. This early HTTP specifies that an HTTP client establishes a connection to an HTTP server using TCP. The client then issues a single “GET” request specifying a resource to be retrieved. The server responds by sending the file as a stream of text bytes, and the connection is terminated. The entire document defining this version of HTTP is only a couple of pages long!

This first version of HTTP was functional, but extremely limited in its capabilities. It didn't support the transfer of any types of data other than hypertext, and it provided no mechanism for any sort of “intelligent” communication between the client and server. This early HTTP prototype was not up to the task of providing the basis for data transfer for the future of the World Wide Web. It was never made an official RFC standard, and in fact, never even had a formal version number; it is known today as HTTP version 0.9, or “HTTP/0.9” using the version format used by HTTP. I believe this number has no particular significance other than being a bit smaller than the number of the first official version of the protocol.

The skeleton of functionality that HTTP/0.9 formed the basis for a rapid evolution of HTTP in the early 1990s. As the World Wide Web grew in size and acceptance, many new ideas and features were incorporated into HTTP. The result of a great deal of development effort was the formalization of the first HTTP standard: version 1.0. This much enhanced HTTP was published in May 1996 as RFC 1945, Hypertext Transfer Protocol — HTTP/1.0. It had been in use for several years prior to that formal publication date, however.

HTTP/1.0 transformed HTTP from a trivial request/response application to a true messaging protocol. It described a complete message format for HTTP, and explained how it should be used for client requests and server responses. One of the most important changes in HTTP/1.0 was the generalization of the protocol to handle many types of different media, as opposed to strictly hypertext documents. This was done by borrowing concepts and header constructs from the Multipurpose Internet Mail Extensions (MIME) standard defined for e-mail. At the same time that it defined much more capable Web servers and clients, HTTP/1.0 retained backwards compatibility with servers and clients still using HTTP/0.9.

HTTP/1.0 was the version of HTTP that was widely implemented in the mid-1990s as the Web exploded in popularity. After only a couple of years, HTTP accounted for the majority of the traffic on the burgeoning Internet. The popularity of HTTP was in fact so great that it single-handedly prompted the installation of a lot of new hardware to handle the load of browser requests and Web server replies.

Unfortunately, much of this huge load of traffic was due to some limitations in HTTP itself. These only became apparent due to the tremendous growth in the use of the protocol which, combined with the normal growing pains of the Internet, led to many frustrated Web users. The inefficiencies of HTTP version 1.0 were a result of design limitations such as the need for each site to be hosted on a different server, the fact that each HTTP session handled only one client request, and a general lack of support for necessary performance-enhancing features such as caching, proxying and partial resource retrieval.

TCP/IP Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP) 1 2 3 HTTP General Operation and Connections