Consider adding an exercise on reusing sockets

On Downloading Web Pages, there is a “Go further” section on supporting redirects. One of the things that becomes “obvious” if you know about the handshake process is that closing and opening a socket is kind of wasteful.

Once you support HTTP 1.1, it seems like you should be able to reuse the socket by not immediately closing it, and then requesting the Location of a redirect. Would that be a useful exercise for readers, or is that just an “obvious” thing that you already expect readers to do?

[pavpanchekha]

Ooh, I’ll look into this. In reality we need to self-host all of our examples and exercises, because things like this change!

[pavpanchekha]

You don’t need keep-alive in HTTP/1.1, it’s the default (this is in fact why this book uses 1.0). Implementing “keep-alive” is a good exercise, and I think I drafted one at some point. I didn’t think of using it for redirects though, that’s a good idea. Perhaps I’ll have something like this in a later chapter, once we’re requesting CSS or JS.