Walks through the basics of the HTTP protocol, URLs, cookies and caching, with tricks and tips that can be used by web developers. From a Geek.class I did on Oct 6, 2011 for Meet the Geeks.
Comic: How a Web Browser Works http://www.labnol.org/internet/comic-how-browser-works/18086/
RFC 3986: Uniform Resource Identifier (URI): Generic Syntax – Current Standard http://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc3986 RFC 1738: Uniform Resource Locators http://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc1738 RFC 1630: Universal Resource Identifiers in WWW http://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc1630
Maximum URL Lengths http://www.boutell.com/newfaq/misc/urllength.html
Wikipedia: SPDY Protocol http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SPDY SPDY: An experimental protocol for a faster web http://dev.chromium.org/spdy/spdy-whitepaper
Wikipedia: Domain Name System http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Domain_Name_System
Wikipedia: Transmission Control Protocol (TCP) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transmission_Control_Protocol
RFC 2616: Hypertext Transfer Protocol -- HTTP/1.1 http://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc2616 RFC 1945: Hypertext Transfer Protocol -- HTTP/1.0 http://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc1945
PHP Charset FAQ http://kore-nordmann.de/blog/php_charset_encoding_FAQ.html PHP: Character Sets / Character Encoding Issues http://www.phpwact.org/php/i18n/charsets RFC 6265: HTTP State Management Mechanism http://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc6265
How To Optimize Your Site With GZIP Compression http://betterexplained.com/articles/how-to-optimize-your-site-with-gzip-compression/
Request Processing in Apache http://www.apachetutor.org/dev/request
PHP Equivalents for ASP Objects http://phplens.com/phpeverywhere/node/view/32
RFC 6265: HTTP State Management Mechanism http://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc6265