πŸ”’ HTTP

🎯 Learning Target

Do Now

β€œThe internet works in layers.”

What do you think this means?

Protocols

The internet protocol β€œstack”

The system was constructed with layers of abstraction where each layer only needs to concern itself with its specific job, and then hands it off to another layer. This makes the very complicated task of digital network communication possible. At the top layer, for example, DNS just thinks is β€œspeaking DNS” to some other computer - the DNS protocol does not even need to know how the other layers work It just relies on them doing their jobs.

HTTP

HTTP in action

You will use your browser’s developer tools to discover what kind of HTTP traffic is associated with visiting different types of websites. You and your partner are going to look at least 5 different types of websites:

  1. http://bsk.education – a very simple web page. Use this first to investigate developer tools.
  2. A β€œstatic” website like: Wikipedia
  3. A news website like: ESPN.com, BuzzFeed, the New York Times, etc.
  4. A streaming site like: YouTube, or Spotify
  5. A site that accepts user input like: twitter, Facebook, email, google docs.

For each type of website below, follow these steps:

  1. Monitor the HTTP traffic generated by loading the page.
  2. Once the page has loaded, poke around with the other information the developer tools let you see about the data coming in. What about the protocols can you see?
  3. Interact with the website by clicking links or using other functionality on the site, noting how this affects the HTTP traffic.
  4. Observe other things like:
    • Total amount of data received
    • Number of HTTP requests actually generated by loading one page
    • Total time to load the page.
    • Types of data received through HTTP (it’s more than just HTML)