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Twenty-six years later, [...] the HTTP protocol is still the same. Not true at all. Early HTTP (which became known as HTTP/0.9) was very primitive and very dif
by joosters 12y ago
Twenty-six years later, [...] the HTTP protocol is still the same.
Not true at all. Early HTTP (which became known as HTTP/0.9) was very primitive and very different from what is used today. It was five or six years until HTTP/1.0 emerged, with a format similar to what we have today.
- TazeTSchnitzel 12y agoThank you, I was going to point it out myself. Early HTTP was literally just this: GET /somepath That's it. Nothing more (well, that and a CRLF), nothing less. The response was equally barren: just pure HTML. Existent page? HTML. Non-existent page? HTML error message. Plaintext file? HTML. (The text is wrapped in a <plaintext> tag.) Anything else? Probably HTML, though you could also deliver binary files this way (good luck reliably distinguishing HTML and binary without a MIME type)! I actually like HTTP/0.9. If you're stuck in some weird programming language without an HTTP/1.1 client (HTTP/1.0 is useless because it lacks Host:, while HTTP/0.9 actually does support shared hosts, just use a fully-qualified URI) you can just open a TCP port to a web server and send a GET request the old fashioned way.