HTTP request and response messages

Question

If a user requests a HTML web page that consists of some text and three images. For this page, will the client send one HTTP request message and receive four HTTP response messages from the server? or will client have to send separate HTTP request message for each of the three images?

Answer 1

The client requests one resource at a time. It first gets the HTML response. It then parses that response and finds references to images in there. It then goes to fetch those images in separate requests; or perhaps gets them from a local cache if it already has them.

Note that in HTTP/2, the server can proactively send the images together with the initial HTML response if it anticipates that the client will ask for them anyway. That shortens the roundtrip time considerably, but also means the client will receive a large response whether it has already cached the images or not.

Answer 2

The client sends the connection request, and then when the server accepts the request, the server sends the web page to the client in small packages, when the client receives the response from the server the web page is displayed.

I hope this resolves the doubt.