Sending User Defined Input to a Web Server
- As you know from the introductory piece, "Web Programming 101", web programming is a game of getting user input, processing that input, and returning a dynamic response.
- Thus, the first thing that you must learn how to do is get user input from a web browser to a web server.
- Fortunately the HTTP protocol provides two main ways to send information to a web server above and beyond the URL of a requested file.
- These two ways are the POST and GET methods.
| HTTP/1.0 also specifies a HEAD method that is used to transmit header information only. It is used primarily by indexing search robots and not web programmers 1 so we will not discuss it here. Similarly we will not discuss the PUT or the DELETE methods that are a part of the HTTP 1.1 specifications still in formulation. |
Notes:
- Spiders will also get whole pages, to index the content
- HTTP/1.0 is used by other software which does caching, e.g. browsers, may use HEAD to determine if update is needed.
- links checking software uses HEAD
Additional Resources:
Pre-requisites
Table of Contents
The GET Method
