ibps-so 2016 · Question 20 of 394

The corporate website of Chandrabhaga Urban Bank, together with the internet-banking front end that stands behind it, is served from a farm of web servers at the data centre. When a customer types the bank's address into a browser, the browser opens a connection to the server and sends across it a short text message naming a method and a resource; the server answers with a status line, a set of headers and the resource itself. The server keeps no memory of the exchange once it has answered, which is why the bank has had to carry the customer's identity from one page to the next by a session cookie. A trainee has asked for a plain statement of what exactly the protocol governing that exchange is. HTTP is correctly described as:

1. AA stateless application-layer protocol of the request–response kind, used to transfer hypertext and other resources between a client and a web server, ordinarily over a TCP connection to port 80Correct
2. BA mark-up language in which the pages served by the web server are themselves written
3. CA transport-layer protocol that guarantees ordered and reliable delivery of the page to the browser
4. DA scheme of addressing by which a name such as a website address is resolved into a numeric address
5. EA mail protocol by which a client fetches messages held for it upon a server and may leave them there