Ans :
In the previous sections, you have been explained about the client-server architectures
and the features of the language required for web application development. In these
sections, you have been told that data from the client is passed to the server using a
protocol. In this section, we define some of the basic methods that make this
communication possible.
Hyper Text Transfer Protocol (HTTP) is the protocol that is used for WWW. HTTP is
an application level protocol. What is an application level protocol? Please find out
answer to this question from BCS041: Fundamentals of Computer Networks. Present
version that is in use is HTTP/1.1.
An interesting related work that has helped WWW immensely is the concept of
MIME (Multipurpose Internet Mail Extensions). MIME is a standard that was
designed by an Internet Engineering Task Force Working Group. It was designed so
that you can include or attach multimedia contents such as pictures, audio, video etc.
and non-ASCII texts in your emails. The standard defines the way to represent and
encode such contents. MIME standard became very popular and now it is used to
describe content type for the Internet also. In the context of HTTP it defines the
format of data for transmission. Internet Media Types, also called MIME type, defines
the content type that is being transmitted over the Internet using HTTP or some other
protocols. Some of the examples of theses Internet Media Types are:
| File Type | Description |
| audio/mp4 | The audio file containing audio data as per mp4 standard |
| image/png | Image file containing picture in Portable Network Graphics format. |
| text/css | Human readable text data containing style sheet content |
| ……….. | ……….. |
