Understanding HTTP

The protocol you use to browse the web, called HTTP is a stateless protocol. This means that once a request is served, the connection between the browser and the webserver is terminated and for a new request to the same server, another connection is established.
For example, when you type https://varnam.org in your browser, an http connection is made from your browser to the server hosting this site. Now after visiting the site, you find that there is an anti-communist article of your liking and click on it. For this request, a new connection is made, even though it is to the same server. What this means is that, there is no memory of the previous connection.
To understand this concept better, let’s take the help of P. Musharraf, the man running the country next door. Today he issued a statement that Pakistan should have increased cultural ties with India as it would lead to ‘speedy resolution of disputes’.
Currently India is on the receiving end of the explosive Pakistani culture spread by organizations like the Lashkar-e-Toiba and there should be some way for us to reciprocate, by exporting some movies of Uday Chopra, Suneil Shetty and Bobby Deol. This call for increased cultural ties comes at a time when Pakistan has banned the import of Indian movies and Musharraf, the friendly culture-vulture, seems to have forgotten it. If this export cannot happen, how can any ‘dispute’ be solved?
For the sake of the media, Musharraf produces these sound bites one after the other without any memory of the previous transactions, just like the HTTP protocol.

11 thoughts on “Understanding HTTP

  1. Cool. 🙂
    While HTTP continues to be as forgetful of its previous transactions, it changed in one aspect though with version 1.1: a single connection can be used for multiple requests. Which is like: Musharraf banning Indian movies and then promptly pleading for greater cultural exchnages with India: both in the course of the _same_ speech. Of course, Mushy is not gonna be left behind: I’m sure he’ll catch up with HTTP/1.1 one of these days.

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