Introducing the HTTP protocol
The Hypertext Transfer Protocol, or HTTP, is one of the best known and most used internet protocols today. It was originally designed in 1989 by Tim Berners-Leeas a means to publish hypertext documents on a distributed set of servers, today called web servers. Clients, for example web browsers, would be able to fetch these documents using the HTTP protocol. Hyper, meaning beyond in the word hypertext, literally means beyond the text, signifying the possibility to link to other hypertext documents from within the text itself. These referenced documents may in turn reside on other servers. To achieve this, each document, or resource, is assigned a Uniform Resource Locator or URL. This URL is treated as a simple string but contains all the information the client needs to find and download the contents of the resource.
Resources on the web are not necessarily hypertext documents. They can be images, audio, video, binary applications, or more generally, any type of...
