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Asked: 2026-05-30T22:09:00+00:00

There’s too much elaboration about the HTTP protocol. But to its essensce, it’s nothing

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There’s too much elaboration about the HTTP protocol. But to its essensce, it’s nothing but a string of ASCII characters transmitted over the TCP protocol. And the string defines the semantic of the protocol. Am I right on this?

If so, 2 questions follows:

  1. Can we devise any protocols as we want, cause it just looks like
    passing strings over the internet.
  2. Why don’t we compress the HTTP strings before we pass it down to the TCP level?
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1 Answer

  1. Editorial Team

    That’s right, HTTP is by no means a special, but because it underpins the web it receives a lot of attention. It’s an application level protocol like SMTP or FTP or any other.

    1. Yes, you could design any protocol you like. For fun, grab an RFC for SMTP, FTP or HTTP and connect to your own server and learn the protocol. RFC2324 is also required reading – http://www.faqs.org/rfcs/rfc2324.html
    2. Lack of HTTP header compression has been talked about a lot in recent years. See Steve Souders blog/books, YSlow! and Google Page Speed sites. The SPDY protocol is probably going to be the front runner at addressing several of the current issues with HTTP connection management, performance and security – http://www.chromium.org/spdy/spdy-whitepaper
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