I think it would be easier to just have them look at the network tab of the developer tools of whatever web browser. It will break down requests and responses for you to easily see. I suspect a very small percentage of the web in just plain text. Most of it is encrypted, and if you ignore that, most of it is compressed, and if you ignore that HTTP/2 and HTTP/3 are not plain text.
HTTP/2 and /3 are where "the web" really changes to become just another shitty network protocol. The beauty of HTTP was in it being hyperTEXT; now it might as well be some Novell crap.
I know that there are Reasons and blablabla but at an emotional level it's the end of an era, same to all these sites going React. The web used to be built on simple and easily-understandable tech, and now it just isn't.
No, HTTP is for TRANSFERRING hypertext. There is no reason that the transfer protocol needs to work in plain text (on top of TCP which isn't plain text either).
Too much abstraction, and not enough diversity. How many exercises could you make around looking the network tab on a browser?
With the approach based on sockets, they have to implement the http protocol ( or a subset of it), synchronize the client and server, and if you have a multithreaded server, you get to implement connection keep alive and things like that. The depth you go is much much different!
>How many exercises could you make around looking the network tab on a browser?
I was not suggesting to do an exercise. If the goal of your exercise is to show that the web is built off text being passed back and forth it can easily be shown by just looking at the network tab. From a web development perspective the exact details of how HTTP packets are encoded are not that important. For the same reason a deep knowledge of TCP is not really important.
