Appendix E. HTTP cheat sheet

Table of Contents
E.1. Terminology
E.2. Status codes
E.3. HTTP Methods

This appendix contains a brief overview of some terminology and other information related to the Hypertext Transfer Protocol. It has been taken from RFC 1945, by Tim Berners-Lee, May 1996.

E.1. Terminology

authentication

The process by which a client sends username and password information to the server, in an attempt to become authorized to view a restricted resource.

client

An application program that establishes connections for the purpose of sending requests.

Content-type

The media type of the body of the response, as given in the Content-type: header. Examples include text/html, text/plain, image/gif, etc.

method

Indicates what the server should do with a resource. Case sensitive. Valid methods include: GET, HEAD, POST

request

An HTTP request message sent by a client to a server

resource

A network data object or service which can be identified by a URI.

response

An HTTP response message sent by a server to a client

server

An application program that accepts connections in order to service requests by sending back responses.

status code

A 3-digit integer indicating the result of the server's attempt to understand and satisfy the request. A table of status codes and their meanings appears below.

Uniform Resource Identifier (URI)

URIs are formatted strings which identify - via name, location, or any other characteristic - a network resource.

Uniform Resource Locator (URL)

A web address. May be expressed absolutely (eg http://www.example.com/services/index.html) or in relation to a base URI (eg ../index.html) See also URI.

user agent

The client which initiates a request. These are often browsers, editors, spiders (web-traversing robots) or other end-user tools.