Anatomy of an HTTP Request - Free HTML Lessons | Full Stack Web Development | Nextsem

1. The HTTP Request Line & Verbs

1. Browsers send HTTP requests to servers.

2. Requests start with action verbs like GET.

3. Request paths target specific website documents.

4. Protocol version specifies HTTP standard used.

5. Servers process request verbs to return content.

Example

Try it Yourself »

GET /index.html HTTP/1.1

Host: 127.0.0.1:5500

User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows 11)

Accept: text/html

Connection: keep-alive

2. Inspecting HTTP Requests in Chrome DevTools

Google Chrome DevTools Network Tab HTTP Headers Inspection

1. Press F12 to open Chrome DevTools.

2. Select Network tab from top bar.

3. Reload page to capture active requests.

4. Click index.html to view Request Headers.

5. Panel displays method, status, and headers.

3. Inspecting Server Response Headers with curl.exe

Inspecting HTTP Response Headers using curl.exe

1. Curl fetches raw headers in terminal.

2. Flag -I requests header data only.

3. Server returns status HTTP 200 OK.

4. Content-Type verifies text/html document transfer.

5. Headers report server caching and compression.

⊞Administrator: Windows 11 Command Prompt (cmd.exe)

>curl.exe -I https://nextsem.online/

⊞Windows 11 Execution OutputReal PC Match

Microsoft Windows [Version 10.0.22631.3007] (Windows 11 Pro x86_64)

HTTP/1.1 200 OK Connection: keep-alive Content-Length: 58129 Cache-Control: max-age=3600 Content-Type: text/html; charset=utf-8 Etag: "4b2a58c512e5c9776fe87f1ba1c4b5268cc3833e7d1374d604ea55ccc45600ec" Strict-Transport-Security: max-age=31556926 Accept-Ranges: bytes Date: Sun, 13 Sep 2026 15:29:27 GMT X-Cache: HIT

4. Essential HTTP Verbs Reference

1. GET requests and retrieves web documents.

2. POST submits new form and data.

3. PUT replaces existing server resources completely.

4. PATCH applies partial modifications to data.

5. DELETE removes targeted resources from server.