HTTP Tutorials

Quick reference to HTTP headers

This document lists all the message headers defined in the HTTP/1.1 protocol, with short descriptions. In the list, the name of the header is a link to its definition in the protocol itself.

HTTP Made Really Easy

This tutorial explains the simple, English-based structure of HTTP communication, and teaches you the practical details of writing HTTP clients and servers. It assumes you know basic socket programming

W3C HTTP Overview

W3C page with links to specifications, drafts, papers and reports, sample software, mailing lists, etc.

HTTP/1.1 RFC

Hypertext Transfer Protocol -- HTTP/1.1

HTTP Tutorial

HTTP tutorial that covers the request, response and entity headers as well as cgi variables and operation

HyperText Transfer Protocol (WDVL)

Overview of general properties of http, http headers, request and response.

How Http Works

A one-page introduction to http. If you click the "Home" link you will get a page where you can type in a web address and see the http headers displayed

HTTP Codes

No doubt you have seen 404 already, but this page has a list of many http codes and their meaning.

Http Attributes

Attributes describe the web server and the requested file. This is a list of some of the more common ones.

HTTP Specifications and Drafts

IETF Request For Comments (RFCs)

IETF Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP) Working Group

Internet Engineering Task Force working group page has various drafts, papers, mailing list archive and http resources.

Change History for HTTP (W3C)

This is the inverse chronological list of changes to the HTTP specification. (downloadable reports)

The Original HTTP as defined in 1991

This document defines the Hypertext Transfer protocol (HTTP) as originally implemented by the World Wide Web initaitive software in the prototype released. This is a subset of the full HTTP protocol, and is known as HTTP 0.9.

Basic HTTP as defined in 1992

This document is a hyperlinked Internet Draft. This is a historic document and is not accurate anymore (but still interesting nonetheless)