HTTP: Response

Once the server receives an HTTP request from the client, it returns an HTTP response.

If the HTTP request was a GET, the HTTP response consists of the following lines (Richmond 1995):

Protocol and status confirmation 
HTTP/1.0 200 OK
Date and time 
Date: Monday, 24-Apr-95 12:04:12 GMT
Server type and version number 
Server: NCSA/1.1
MIME version (describes content of data) 
MIME-version: 1.0
Last modified date of the resource 
Last-modified: Sunday, 23-Apr-95 23:33:16 GMT
Type of information in the response 
Content-type: text/html
Number of characters that will be sent 
Content-length: 7362
A blank line 
(blank)
Data 
<html>

<head>

<title>

...
</html>

If the request was something other than GET, the server will return a status message such as "200 OK" (Richmond 1995) along with other information that might be needed by the client.

Because the HTTP request and response include negotiation of the exact protocol, future versions of HTTP will be able to coexist with current versions.