Come to think of it, another surprisingly simple protocol you might want to have a shot at for the fun is VNC.
It's also really rewarding to end up with a picture on the screen, once it works. Nowadays the entry barrier to real-time graphics programming is IMO really darn high for beginners, but a simplistic VNC server might get you a step closer to the MS-DOS days, where we could literally draw pixels into RAM.
(Or, you could just extend your tiny HTTP server to support Motion JPEG, which is basically just a single HTTP response header, followed by a diarrhea of JPEG images.)
It's also really rewarding to end up with a picture on the screen, once it works. Nowadays the entry barrier to real-time graphics programming is IMO really darn high for beginners, but a simplistic VNC server might get you a step closer to the MS-DOS days, where we could literally draw pixels into RAM.
(Or, you could just extend your tiny HTTP server to support Motion JPEG, which is basically just a single HTTP response header, followed by a diarrhea of JPEG images.)