How does the communication between a browser and a web server take place?

Question

Can anyone explain how the communication takes place between the browser and web server? I want to learn how

• GET, POST verbs (among others)
• cookies

Answer 1

Your browser first resolves the servername via DNS to an IP. Then it opens a TCP connection to the webserver and tries to communicate via HTTP. Usually that is on TCP-port 80 but you can specify a different one (http://server:portnumber).

HTTP looks like this:

Once it is connected, it sends the request, which looks like:

GET /site HTTP/1.0
Header1: bla
Header2: blub
{emptyline}

E.g., a header might be Authorization or Range. See here for more.

Then the server responds like this:

200 OK
Header3: foo
Header4: bar

content following here...

E.g., a header might be Date or Content-Type. See here for more.

Look at Wikipedia for HTTP for some more information about this protocol.