CGI-HTTP Headers

Before looking at how the server responds to a request to run a CGI program first dissect the HTTP header. The first line of the server response is always I , status message and is called the status header, It tells you whether or not the server was successful finding the file. The format of this line is HTTP/1.0 number message where " number " is the status number and " message " is the status message. A status number of 200 means the retrieval was successful. HTTP/1.0 is the protocol type and version. Skipping down a few lines, notice the line Content length: 98. This tells the browser how large the data following the headers is in bytes. If you count the number of characters, including the invisible newline characters as a character, you will find that there are 98 of them,

The last two fields of the line, represent the status code and content length, respectively, the same information that is returned by the server to the browser in the HTTP header. The Date header returns the date of the request according to the server. The Last Modified header returns the date and time. The Server header gives the name and version number of the server.

Finally, the Content Type header tells the browser what kind of information to expect. text/html is the multipurpose Internet Mail Extension (MIME) type of HTML files. MIME is a way of describing the type of data.

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