MCP Client — References

The protocol being spoken, the message layer underneath it, and the transport behaviours a connection manager has to get right.

The protocol

• Model Context Protocol — the specification and its documentation, covering initialisation, capability negotiation, the offerings a server can advertise, and the notifications that announce changes to them. Linked at the root deliberately: the revision structure and section anchors have moved between releases.

The message layer

• JSON-RPC 2.0 Specification — request, response, notification, and error-object semantics, including batching and the rule that a notification receives no reply. This is the layer at which a client distinguishes a transport failure from an application error.

Transports

• RFC 9110: HTTP Semantics — status-code classes, conditional requests, and connection semantics for the HTTP-based transport.
• Server-Sent Events — the event-stream format in the HTML Living Standard, including the reconnection and last-event identifier behaviour a resuming client depends on.

Why server-supplied text is untrusted

• Greshake et al., Not What You've Signed Up For: Compromising Real-World LLM-Integrated Applications with Indirect Prompt Injection, 2023, arXiv:2302.12173 — the general argument that text retrieved from an external party and placed in context functions as instruction.

No verified reference is recorded for client-side connection supervision practice, for cross-server name-collision conventions, or for re-approval of a changed server surface. These are currently implementation conventions in individual host applications rather than anything specified.