HTTP GET Request Structure

Question

Consider the following hyperlink:

<a href="http://www.cs.rutgers.edu/∼shklar/">

What HTTP/1.0 request will get submitted by the browser? What HTTP/1.1 request will get submitted by the browser?

Will these requests change if the browser is configured to contact an HTTP proxy? If yes, how?

Answer 1

While you could use tcpdump to dump the actual network traffic, curl is surely more handy to test the HTTP conversation from the command line.

An HTTP/1.0 request:

curl -v -0 http://www.cs.rutgers.edu/∼shklar/
* About to connect() to www.cs.rutgers.edu port 80 (#0)
*   Trying 128.6.4.24...
* connected
* Connected to www.cs.rutgers.edu (128.6.4.24) port 80 (#0)
> GET /∼shklar/ HTTP/1.0
> User-Agent: curl/7.24.0 (x86_64-apple-darwin12.0) libcurl/7.24.0 OpenSSL/0.9.8r zlib/1.2.5
> Host: www.cs.rutgers.edu
> Accept: */*
> 
< HTTP/1.1 404 Not Found
< Date: Wed, 31 Oct 2012 17:57:31 GMT
< Server: Apache/1.3.26 (Unix)
< Content-Type: text/html; charset=iso-8859-1
< Connection: close

An HTTP/1.1 request:

curl -v http://www.cs.rutgers.edu/∼shklar/ 
* About to connect() to www.cs.rutgers.edu port 80 (#0)
*   Trying 128.6.4.24...
* connected
* Connected to www.cs.rutgers.edu (128.6.4.24) port 80 (#0)
> GET /∼shklar/ HTTP/1.1
> User-Agent: curl/7.24.0 (x86_64-apple-darwin12.0) libcurl/7.24.0 OpenSSL/0.9.8r zlib/1.2.5
> Host: www.cs.rutgers.edu
> Accept: */*
> 
< HTTP/1.1 404 Not Found
< Date: Wed, 31 Oct 2012 17:59:47 GMT
< Server: Apache/1.3.26 (Unix)
< Content-Type: text/html; charset=iso-8859-1
< Transfer-Encoding: chunked

Use the -x (or --proxy) <[protocol://][user@password]proxyhost[:port]> switch to use a proxy and see the results.

More about curl here: http://curl.haxx.se/docs/manpage.html