HTTP Stands for "Hyper Text Transfer Protocol", and is the protocol that applications use to access documents/webpages/data from the world wide web.

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17
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3answers
1k views

What does WWW do?

To be clear: I am not asking whether or not I should use www in my url, or what the pros and cons are, that topic is well covered. I also wasn't sure if this was a Stack Overflow, Server Fault, or ...
11
votes
4answers
936 views

Loading main javascript on every page? Or breaking it up to relevant pages?

I have a 700kb decompressed JS file which is loaded on every page. Before I had 12 javascript files on each page but to reduce http requests I compressed them all into 1 file. This file is ~130kb ...
10
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2answers
1k views

Considerations of the HTTP Content-MD5 Header

We are debating whether to use the Content-MD5 header. Pros: The CMS allows us to easily include it with minimal overhead (cached responses in 80%+ of the cases). It would add another layer of ...
7
votes
2answers
760 views

What are the Consequences for using Relative Location Headers?

According to the spec, Location headers used in a redirect require a server name HTTP/1.1 301 Moved Permanently ... Location: http://example.com/foo/baz/bar However, in 2012, most web browsers will ...
7
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0answers
344 views

Why is honest cloaking for Ajax considered bad practice? [closed]

Ajax-only websites are laden with many problems. Search engine invisibility is merely a small problem. They are also unbookmarkable and unlinkable and they break the functionality of back- and ...
6
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2answers
66 views

HTTP: How to be deleted from search engines at a certain point in time in the future?

Is there a way to tell search engines, that a page they crawl should be included in the search results now, but have to be deleted at a certain time in the future? I have a website where hundreds of ...
6
votes
1answer
107 views

Does the SPDY protocol eliminate the need for cookieless domains?

With plain HTTP, cookieless domains are an optimization to avoid unnecessarily sending cookie headers for page resources. However, the SPDY protocol compresses HTTP headers and in some cases ...
6
votes
1answer
237 views

When to reply 400 Bad Request

According to www.w3.org, a Web server should reply with status code 400 Bad Request if: "The request could not be understood by the server due to malformed syntax. The client SHOULD NOT repeat ...
5
votes
3answers
771 views

Does it make sense to return a 410 instead of 404 when some page has been permanently removed?

Does it make sense to return a 410 instead of 404 when some page has been permanently removed? In this video, Matt Cutts says that Google treats them the same, but are there other reasons to implement ...
5
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3answers
4k views

HTTPS best practices for SEO and usability

Consider a page, http://example.com, which can be viewed both publicly and when a user authenticates. Now suppose you enable HTTPS for every page when a user logs into your website, but only when they ...
4
votes
6answers
917 views

WWW.yoursite.com or HTTP://yoursite.com which one is futureproof?

http://yoursite.com www.yoursite.com http://www.yoursite.com yoursite.com Which of these would you choose as your favourite to work with, if you were to make a site for 2011 and beyond, which ...
4
votes
2answers
374 views

HTTP for one part of the site, HTTPS for other

We have a site which is HTTP, but it has an admin part. How can we secure the admin part with HTTPS? For example, WordPress (which I know) is located at http://foo.com, but we want to have ...
4
votes
1answer
72 views

Is there a way to return a response every x seconds or so to a single http request?

I'm wondering if it's possible to send a response every second or so to a single http request. Like for example the client makes an http request, then the server sends a space character every second. ...
4
votes
1answer
104 views

Cannot access my own web page

I am developing, learning and experimenting with php,html,javascript,flash and so on. Having web hosting and all of the cpanel, phpmyadmin and other utilities. One day, while updating information, ...
4
votes
1answer
977 views

HTTP Header Cache Time: s-maxage and max-age

I am setting up a CDN for my website, I found the following sample for adding to the 'httpd.conf' file, this is used to adjust the cache-time for client and CDN: ExpiresActive On ExpiresByType ...
4
votes
1answer
640 views

Redirect from SSL HTTPS to HTTP (NO SSL)

Many of my visitors have bookmarked my site already with https://mydomain.com. Under the bad advice of a programmer I have put my whole site (Joomla) using SSL. I do not sell anything or provide any ...
4
votes
1answer
60 views

How to track HTTP and HTTPS from the same Google Analytics account?

I have a website with tutorials and a discuss forum. The website load on http protocol and the forum load with https for security reasons. For both of them I run the default Google Analytics code, but ...
4
votes
1answer
72 views

HTTP Headers caching

I am not totally sure bout HTTP headers, but from what I read its good to have some level of caching on static pages also I am not sure if Transfer Encoding: chunked is a good thing. I was not finding ...
3
votes
1answer
278 views

Is there a Java-based web browser that doesn't follow hyperlinks properly?

Looking through my logs, I get this error a lot: A potentially dangerous Request.Path value was detected from the client (:). The error is usually due to someone navigating to a URL like this: ...
3
votes
2answers
1k views

I used a 301 Permanent Redirect to a 3rd party site by mistake! Can I stop the redirection?

Oh Noes! I've been parking a domain name for a friend/client of mine on my hosting provider (Dreamhost, FWIW) for a while, and they eventually asked me to redirect their domain to a 3rd party website ...
3
votes
2answers
129 views

HTTP response for deleted or disabled items on ecommerce store

What HTTP response should you send when an item/category on your ecommerce site has been disabled or deleted? 410 looks correct for deleted products but not sure about something that has been disabled ...
3
votes
2answers
165 views

What MIME type are you meant to use for JavaScript files?

In the html we always use <script type="text/javascript" charset="utf-8" src="???"></script> (the ECMA stuff confuses some browsers) but on the HTTP side what are you meant to use as the ...
3
votes
2answers
90 views

Is there additional overhead for status code 500s?

We have these web applications that require specific information in a query string. If that information is not provided, the applications throw an error. It seems to me that we should explicitly ...
3
votes
2answers
72 views

Browser privacy improvement implications for websites

On https://panopticlick.eff.org/ EFF let you test the number of uniquely identifying bits that the browser gives a website. Among these are HTTP header fields such as User-Agent, Accept, ...
3
votes
1answer
151 views

Difficulty enabling caching on inherited site

I have been asked to work on a corporate website a previous employee had created. The site is on shared GoDaddy hosting. One of the first things I noticed (after the 140KB JPEG on the front page, ...
3
votes
1answer
166 views

Use - or misuse - of ETags

I'm using an application that sets ETags by md5()ing the URL. As I understand it, that's quite insane. In effect, it means that content for a specific URL won't be fetched anew ... ever. Unless a ...
2
votes
2answers
846 views

Should 304 Not Modified responses include the “Last Modified” header?

I've been using the most excellent http://redbot.org tool for testing have HTTP headers on my site correct (its custom code in PHP serving dynamic content - wanting to ensure it cached where possible ...
2
votes
2answers
2k views

Apache logs: “::1 … ”OPTIONS * HTTP/1.0" 200 -

Just looking at logs of a not-so-busy site on one of our Apache servers and notice tons of these in the log: ::1 - - [15/Apr/2011:12:11:40 -0700] "OPTIONS * HTTP/1.0" 200 - ::1 - - ...
2
votes
1answer
189 views

Can a web-server be reached in other ways than through `HTTP` or externally?

A server hosting an application built in PHP: Can the server be reached in other ways than through HTTP or externally? Is GET and POST only populated through the HTTP protocol? Is HTTP headers, GET ...
2
votes
1answer
2k views

Redirect HTTPS request to HTTP in Apache

Can an HTTPS request be redirected to an HTTP request in Apache? If so, how?
2
votes
3answers
92 views

Which content or HTTP status should return unused domain?

We've recently bought couple of domains but the content of the domains is still under development. Which content should we upload to the domains to tell search engines "There is currently nothing, ...
2
votes
1answer
55 views

Why was 303 skipped in HTTP/1.0?

While looking back over HTTP response codes today I noticed that the 301, 302, and 304 response codes were defined in HTTP/1.0 but not the 303 response code. Does anyone know why the number 303 was ...
2
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2answers
110 views

Phpmyadmin http password security

Is my password sent unencrypted when using Phpmyadmin through http? If not, is there any downside using http compared to https?
2
votes
2answers
95 views

Deleted files still accessible without www in url

I have deleted all files and all hidden files off my server, there is nothing but log files which cannot be deleted. Ironically, files are accessible when nothing is there. Cache cleared, multiple ...
2
votes
1answer
168 views

Reduce HTTP Requests method for js and css

Is these way can Reduce HTTP Requests? multiple javascript files with & symbol <script type="text/javascript" ...
2
votes
1answer
486 views

How to tell google to stop crawling my website via IP?

After a database server migration, Ive noticed that GoogleBot started getting errors when trying to crawl my site. The reason seems to be that its hitting my site via IP address (and due to my config ...
2
votes
3answers
554 views

Why is a # sign added to the end of URLS?

Note: I'm asking this from the perspective of the site developers (trying to help someone there). not as a user. Please don't forward this to superuser.com. It's a server admin question. Have a look ...
2
votes
1answer
50 views

Need a study about average latency due to HTTP request and server processing time when downloading images that are a part of DOM

I'm writing a thesis about css sprites and need to know the of the average HTTP request overhead when establishing a connection to download an image file that is a part of DOM. We conducted a study ...
2
votes
1answer
119 views

http request terminating early

I noticed that on some of my sites, images were occasionally not getting downloaded fully. After a bit of investigation it appears that it is not restricted to images - .css, .js etc were also ...
2
votes
1answer
275 views

Avoid the login popup when using http-auth

I have an Apache. Under the DOCUMENTROOT is a folder with an .htpasswd file for http-auth. If I open the browser and request the content in the folder I get an Popup to login. Is there a way to avoid ...
2
votes
1answer
333 views

Using HTTP (insecure) ad providers on HTTPS (secure) site

As more and more browsers adopt stringent checks around preventing insecure content served up on secure sites, there is impact on the use of ad networks which in many cases don't support the secure ...
2
votes
1answer
180 views

Recommendations on how to validate an web server?

Does anyone know of any tools that can be run against web server to determine how compliant the server is with the various HTTP specs?
1
vote
3answers
104 views

http occurring twice in a URL

I ran into a website today that had two URLs and im completely stunned. The website, not to be specific, has a full address of http://example/cat/http://example/dog. I will say that the first part is ...
1
vote
3answers
81 views

Confused about domain names

I am confused about the difference between http://www.example.com and http://example.com, is that true "www" is actually the subdomain of domain example.com? Do people usually redirect from ...
1
vote
2answers
2k views

Mod Rewrite - directing HTTP/HTTPS traffic to the appropriate virtual hosts

I have an Apache2 web server (v. 2.2.16) running on Debian hosting three virtual hosts. The first two hosts are HTTP only (server1 and server2). The last host is HTTPS only (server3). My virtual host ...
1
vote
2answers
821 views

Lots of http HEAD requests originating from porn sites

My access log on my web server has a ton of http HEAD requests coming from porn sites. What are HEAD requests and are they doing something bad with my site? Here is an excerpt from my log: (valid ...
1
vote
2answers
90 views

What is the default behavior of Cache-Control

If no private nor public were defined in the cache-control, e.g. Cache-Control: max-age=31461276 What is the expected behavior?
1
vote
1answer
107 views

410 permanent delete not working

I've deleted a web page permanently and also added this rule in the bottom of my .htaccess: RewriteRule ^paysignet-payment-gateway-features-and-benefits.html$ - [G,L] But this url of this page: ...
1
vote
2answers
4k views

Where does the HTTP referer “applewebdata” come from?

My site uses a web stat service like Google Analytics, it uses a piece of javascript code to log what pages the visitor has visited and the refer url of each visit. I got some referer "applewebdata", ...
1
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2answers
64 views

http requests, using sprites and file sizes -

Hi all I'm in the process of finding out all about sprites and how they can speed up your pages. So I've used spriteMe to create a overall sprite image which is 130kb, this is made up of 14 images ...

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