Question

There’s one thing I haven’t found in RFC 2616 ("Hypertext Transfer Protocol — HTTP/1.1") and that’s a "canonical" name for a request/response pair. Is there such thing?

4.1 Message Types:

4.1 Message Types     HTTP messages consist of requests from client to server and responses    from server to client.         HTTP-message   = Request | Response     ; HTTP/1.1 messages 

Taking this as a template, which word would you put in the following sentence?

A single complete HTTP ... consists of one HTTP Request and one HTTP Response      HTTP-... = Request Response 

roundtrip? cycle?

Answer 1

The spec calls them "exchanges" (or "request/response exchanges").

Per section 1.4, "Overall Operation":

In HTTP/1.0, most implementations used a new connection for each request/response exchange. In HTTP/1.1, a connection may be used for one or more request/response exchanges […]