Netscape ENTERPRISE SERVER 6.1, Manual

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Appendix E
HyperText Transfer Protocol
The HyperText Transfer Protocol (HTTP) is a protocol (a set of rules that describes
how information is exchanged) that allows a client (such as a web browser) and a
web server to communicate with each other.
HTTP is based on a request/response model. The browser opens a connection to
the server and sends a request to the server.
The server processes the request and generates a response which it sends to the
browser. The server then closes the connection.
This appendix provides a short introduction to a few HTTP basics. For more
information on HTTP, see the IETF home page at:
http://www.ietf.org/home.html
This appendix has the following sections:
• Compliance
• Requests
• Responses
• Buffered Streams
Compliance
Netscape Enterprise Server 6.0 supports HTTP 1.1. Previous versions of the server
supported HTTP 1.0. The server is conditionally compliant with the HTTP 1.1
proposed standard, as approved by the Internet Engineering Steering Group
(IESG) and the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) HTTP working group.