Technology - Web Development 1 - HTTP Basics

Synopsis

We introduce version 1.1 of the Hypertext Transport Protocol - the most important protocol of the World Wide Web. We provide examples of typical requests and responses, explaining web forms, Etag and the MIME types of HTTP message bodies. We also discuss user/password authorisation and the secure, encrypted, HTTPS protocol together with its underlying SSL/TLS (Secure Sockets Layer / Transport Layer Security protocols.

Table of Contents

• 1. Synopsis
• 2. Introduction - the Web
• 3. Introduction to HTTP
• 4. HTTPS
  • 4.1 SSL/TLS Transport Layer Security
  • 4.2 Privacy and security
    • 4.2.1 Symmetrical key length
  • 4.3 Public key cryptography
  • 4.4 Key length and random numbers
  • 4.5 Hardware generation of random numbers
  • 4.6 Authentication of server and client
• 5. HTTP 1.1
  • 5.1 URI, URN and URL
    • 5.1.1 Fragment identifier
  • 5.2 Persistence and pipelining
  • 5.3 Typical request
    • 5.3.1 Entities
    • 5.3.2 Common request headers
  • 5.4 Typical response
  • 5.5 Request and response pairs are independent
  • 5.6 MIME Content-Type header
    • 5.6.1 Content-Type and cgi-bin programs
  • 5.7 Other response headers
  • 5.8 Request methods and headers
    • 5.8.1 GET and HEAD
    • 5.8.2 POST
    • 5.8.3 PUT
    • 5.8.4 DELETE
  • 5.9 Response codes
  • 5.10 ETag
  • 5.11 Authorisation
    • 5.11.1 The ‘password’ file
    • 5.11.2 Basic and MD5-Digest authorisation
  • 5.12 POST and GET methods for web forms
    • 5.12.1 Security issues with form processing
• 6. Related reports