What could be simpler?
--#--
It's this simple: telnet to www.yahoo.com on port 80:<br><br>
<code>
telnet www.yahoo.com 80
Trying 204.71.200.68...
Connected to www.yahoo.com.
Escape character is '^]'.
</code>
<br>

Yahoo has acknowledged you. This connection will remain open only a 
limited time, so go ahead and request Yahoo's root page:<br><br>
<code>
GET / HTTP/1.0

</code>
<br>
The line you just typed is called the "request line" and it's part of the 
"request header." The request line has three tokens, separated by white 
space. The first describes the method of the protocol. We're going to talk 
mostly about the GET, POST and HEAD methods, though there are others, including 
HEAD, PUT and DELETE.<br>
<br>
The second token states the path to the file or the URI for the resource we're 
requesting. In this caes, "/" signifies the index file at the document root 
(be it named index.html, home.html, default.htm, etc.)<br>
<br>
The third token notifies the server that the browser is using the 
HTTP 1.0 version of the protocol. (Other possibilities at the current 
time are HTTP 0.9 and HTTP 1.1.) The protocol string is optional in a 
GET, but still a good idea to state.<br>
<br>
The meat of the HTTP protocol is  made of two actions: The client's 
(or browser's) request and the server's response. Now, press the return 
key again, adding an empty line to the request line you just typed.<br>
<br>
The server should respond with a cascade of HTML-formatted text.  The empty 
line you just typed is used by the server and the browser as code for "this 
part's finished." In the case of a "GET" there's only one part -- the request header, 
which contains the request line and possibly others. So, as soon as the 
server saw that empty line, it responded.<br>
<br>
If you saved Yahoo's HTML response in a scroll-back buffer, scroll the page up 
to where the server response started.<br><br>
<code>
HTTP/1.0 200 OK
Content-length: 10307
Content-Type: text/html

</code>
<br>
The first three lines, separated from the remainder of the response by a blank 
line, comprise the header. Yahoo is telling you that it is using version 1.0 of 
HTTP, that your request was satisfactory and can be fulfilled. (For possible 
server response codes, see <a 
href="http://www.w3.org/Protocols/HTTP/HTRESP.html">W3's list</a>.)<br>
<br>
Yahoo is also telling you the length, in bytes, of what's in the body of the 
response. And it's telling you the mime type, in this case HTML-formatted text.
<br>

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