HTTP requests are not as mysterious as they may seem. Justin James helps make them more accessible by providing an overview of the common items in an HTTP request.
I recently wrote about using Fiddler to examine HTTP traffic for debugging purposes. To better use the information, it helps to know a bit about the guts of the HTTP specification. In this column, I’ll focus on the common items in an HTTP request, so you’ll know what the information means when you see it in a debugger.
The beginning of the HTTP request will have the request line, which will be followed by up to three headers: a general header, a request header, and an entity header. After that will be the message body. The request line specifies the method type (such as GET or POST), the URI requested, and the version of HTTP to use (the current standard is 1.1). Here is the full list of defined method types:
- OPTIONS
- GET
- HEAD
- POST
- PUT
- DELETE
- TRACE
- CONNECT
The URI is not necessarily the full URI (an absolute URI); for example, you can have the host specified in headers and use a relative URI. However, the specification says you should only use the absolute URI when communicating with a proxy server, and that normally you use the absolute path followed by a host header.
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