Hypertext transfer protocol or http is a protocol used by the internet. It was initially made as a way of transferring data from one place to another. It's a standard that allows for an exchange of things on the world wide web like text, videos, graphic, and audio files. HTTP allows users to put hyperlinks on web documents. Used in browsers, http requests information which is provided by another server. When any web browser is used and the user goes to a website they are using a hypertext transfer protocol. How It Works The domain name and port number is given when making a request for a connection. The server either accepts or doesn't accept the request. If it is accepted then the information is transfered. So, someone who wants to access some kind of information from a server makes a request and that server responds by sending the info to the person who requested it. HTTP is the way to request and the info. HTTP status codes The status codes indicate how the server responded to the requests. Status codes that are in the 100's responses that say that there is acknowledgment of the request made. Status codes in the 200's mean that the request has been acknowledged and accepted. Codes in the 300's means that the user is redirected to another site. If it is in the 400's it means that there was an error and it is the user's fault that an error occurred. Like the codes in the 400's, the codes in the 500's are errors, but in this case it's the servers fault. HTTP 1.1 There were important changes made with the version 1.1 of HTTP. One of the improvements made was by allowing the user to use the protocol by just typing in the domain name. So, instead of having to type something like: http://www.google.com they could instead type into the browser www.google.com or even just google.com. All of these use the hypertext transfer protocol, but the latter ones don't require you to type them in. The improvement also allowed for hosts to have multiple domain names accessed through one web server rather than having to build multiple sites with multiple servers that are all owned by the same person. HTTP Secure HTTPS is like HTTP, but instead there is an encryption using a Secure Sockets Layer (SSL). It is like HTTP, but it doesn't receive just any request from anyone. The reason someone would use this, because maybe a business would want to send information to people, but not the public. HTTP secure is a way to send information to a limited amount of people so they can do things they want to send privately like money transactions. |