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The Documentation of an HTTP Server

You may be wondering:

How the heck am I supposed to memorize how all these different servers work???

The good news is that you don't need to. When you work with a backend server, it's the responsibility of that server's developers to provide you with instructions, or documentation that explains how to interact with it. For example, the documentation should tell you:

  • The domain of the server
  • The resources you can interact with (HTTP paths)
  • The supported query parameters
  • The supported HTTP methods
  • Anything else you'll need to know to work with the server

The Server Is the Captain Now

The server has complete control over how the path in a URL is interpreted and used in a request. The same goes for query parameters. While there are a lot of strong conventions around how servers should interpret paths and query parameters, the server can do whatever it wants. That's why you need docs.