How could we fool the HTTP protocol?

Question

Although HTTP is ubiquitous it comes with its baggage of Headers which in my case is becoming more of a problem. My data to be transferred is an iota of the HTTP header size.

• Is there another protocol that I can use which is still understood by the browsers and other networks and doesn't come with the baggage of HTTP?
• Any other way to skip headers and add it at the destination so only a miniscule of data is transferred over the network?

Answer 1

1. No.
2. No.

Many HTTP headers are optional. A typical browser request is much larger than a minimal request, which might look like:

GET /doc HTTP/1.1
Host: example.com
Connection: close

(I can say with confidence that requests of this form work because I use them all the time when testing Web server response via telnet example.com 80.)

Possibly you can get useful results simply by omitting some headers.