Understanding HTTP and WWW

HyperText Transfer Protocol (HTTP) is an application-layer protocol used primarily on the World Wide Web. HTTP uses a client-server model where the web browser is the client and communicates with the webserver that hosts the website. The browser uses HTTP, which is carried over TCP/IP to communicate to the server and retrieve Web content for the user.

HTTP is a widely used protocol and has been rapidly adopted over the Internet because of its simplicity. It is a stateless and connectionless protocol.

The view of the Web page that you see through the window of your Web browser is the result of a conversation between the browser and a Web server computer. The language used for that conversation is called Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP). The data that is delivered from the server to the client is a finely crafted jumble of text, images, addresses, and formatting codes rendered to a unified document through an amazing versatile formatting language called Hypertext Markup Language (HTML).

Web servers and browsers communicate using the Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP). The current version of HTTP (1.1) is described in RFC 2616. The purpose of HTTP is to support the transfer of HTML documents. HTTP is an application-level protocol. The HTTP client and server applications use the reliable TCP transport protocol to establish a connection.

HTTP has the following duties:

• To establish a connection between the browser (the client) and the server

• To negotiate settings and establish parameters for the session

• To provide for the orderly transfer of HTML content

• To close the connection with the server

The World Wide Web (WWW) is a network of online content that is formatted in HTML and accessed via HTTP. The term refers to all the interlinked HTML pages that can be accessed over the Internet. The World Wide Web was originally designed in 1991 by Tim Berners-Lee while he was a contractor at CERN. The World Wide Web is most often referred to simply as "the Web."

The World Wide Web is what most people think of as the Internet. It is all the Web pages, pictures, videos and other online content that can be accessed via a Web browser. The Internet, in contrast, is the underlying network connection that allows us to send email and access the World Wide Web. The early Web was a collection of text-based sites hosted by organizations that were technically gifted enough to set up a Web server and learn HTML. It has continued to evolve since the original design, and it now includes interactive (social) media and user-generated content that requires little to no technical skills. We owe the free Web to Berners-Lee and CERN’s decision to give away one of the greatest inventions of the century.