[WEB4LIB] Re: seeking a browser or software that will display

[Chris Gray]

You can also get started with telnet.  Just type "telnet
host.name.with.dots 80" (80 is the default HTTP port, different from the
telnet default of 23) and after the prompts type the request you want to
send followed by a blank line, like so:

% telnet www.cnn.com 80
Trying 64.236.24.4...
Connected to cnn.com.
Escape character is '^]'.
HEAD / HTTP/1.0

HTTP/1.1 200 OK
Server: Netscape-Enterprise/6.1 AOL
Date: Mon, 04 Nov 2002 14:20:07 GMT
Last-modified: Mon, 04 Nov 2002 14:20:03 GMT
Expires: Mon, 04 Nov 2002 14:21:03 GMT
Cache-control: private,max-age=60
Content-type: text/html
Content-length: 0
Connection: close

Connection closed by foreign host.

Note that HTTP shows its statelessness by disconnecting you as soon as
the response is sent.

The best resources for understanding this stuff are the O'Reilly books by
Clinton Wong "Web Client Programming with Perl" (out of print) and "HTTP
Pocket Reference".

There are Web sites around that help you view HTTP header info in any
browser.  Try, for instance, <http://www.http.header.free.fr/>, but I've
seen others.

Chris

On Mon, 4 Nov 2002, Thomas Dowling wrote:

> At 01:51 AM 11/4/02 -0800, John Fitzgibbon wrote:
> >Hi,
> >
> >I am interested in learning some more about the HTTP protocol,
> >specifically the conversation that takes place between the browser and the
> >web server. Is there a way of directly viewing the stream of text or
> >information that passes between the client and server when using a
> >standard browser such as Netscape, Explorer or Opera?
>
> I have never found a way to get at this information from any of those
> browsers, which is a pity as it seems like Mozilla-based browsers could
> easily include it in their page information display.
>
> You can download a copy of lynx from <http://lynx.browser.org/>.  Then
> try  "lynx -head http://wherever.org/ > headers.txt" or "lynx -mime_header
> http://wherever.org/ > all-content.txt".  Likewise, at least on Unix/Linux
> systems, look for a utility called wget, or two little gems called GET and
> HEAD that install as part of the Perl LWP module.
>
>
>
> Thomas Dowling
> Ohio Library and Information Network
> tdowling at ohiolink.edu
>
>