Unlocking the Power of HTTP: Navigating the Digital Highway

Understand HTTP as a beginner

HTTP is an acronym for HyperText Transfer Protocol. This protocol is the foundation of the World Wide Web and is used to access data in it. It can be used to transfer the data in the form of plain text, hypertext, audio, video, and so on.

Let's discuss some of the features of http

1. Connectionless -> HTTP is considered to be a connectionless protocol. The whole process starts from the host(client) sending a request to the other host(server) and receiving a response. The connection formed between these 2 for sharing of resources is immediately dropped after the response is received.

2. Stateless-> HTTP is also considered to a stateless protocol. This is because the server gets the information from the client as long as it is connected with it (till server sends the response). In this way, the server does not retain any information about the client.

3. Media independent -> HTTP is also media independent. This means that any type of data can be sent to the server via HTTP protocol as long as the server knows how it can handle the data content. Thus, both the client and the server need to specify the content-type of the data.

4. Client server architecture -> This type of model usually involves a client and a server. Here, the server hosts, delivers and manages the resources requested by the client. The client in order to access resources, needs an address which is called URL( Uniform Resource Locator). This URL is consisted of 4 parts and they are :

• Method : The method is the protocol used to retrieve the document from the hosted server. For example, http.
• Host : The host is a computer which is storing the information. Generally computers store web pages. For example, www (not mandatory field)
• Port : It is the port number of the server. This is also an optional field. It comes between the host and path and it should be separated from the host by a :.
• Path : It is the pathname of the file (resource) where the information is stored. It contain / that separates the directories from the subdirectories and files.

I hope this blog was easy to understand the widely used protocol. If you have any queries, or think there is some error please comment down below ! Keep learning !