Easy! IT | WEB | HyperText Transfer Protocol

This article is a rough explanation of the HyperText Transfer Protocol.

Everything might be not exactly correct in this article but it’s very useful for beginners to understand IT terms. If you want to learn IT but you don’t have any experience to work in the IT industry, I wish it helps you to understand IT. And I hope this article makes you study IT more.

Let’s start our 3 minutes lesson!

What is HTTP?

HyperText Transfer Protocol is the protocol for World Wide Web.
HyperText Transfer Protocol is the request-response rule.
HTTP is the abbreviation for HyperText Transfer Protocol.

There are many things you should learn to understand what is HTTP. In this article, I explain the very basic concept of HTTP. I’ll explain other additional explanations of HTTP in other articles.

1. Data transfer rules

HTTP is the transport protocol. Clients(users) request content from their web browsers and the web servers respond to their requests.

For example, this protocol is used when you check the web pages. There are two players in this story. One of them is a web user, and another is a web server.

When Mr Rubber wants to check the web page, he asks Mr WEB server(Mr WEB) to give the web page.

When Mr WEB receives requests, he responds to requests. Mr WEB transmits required data following HTTP rules. At this moment, one of Mr WEB’s responses is transferring HyperText files. That’s the origin that names this protocol HTTP(HyperText Transfer Protocol).

Then Mr Rubber gets what he wants. He can check the web pages, listen to music, and watch videos.

2. Some rules of HTTP

Now you understand this,

The HTTP protocol is “Request – Response” rules.

I already mention that HTTP is a rule. Then what kind of rules do they follow? When you ask people something, you need to tell them why(method)? and what(URL)?. A web service is the same. And HTTP is the rule how to tell “why”, “what” and so on.

HTTP RULE ONE: URL starts from “http://～”.

Speaking of “What(URL)?”, when Mr Rubber requests files to Mr WEB, Mr Rubber uses his web browser. As you know, you put URL starting from “http://～” in the web browser. This is one of the HTTP rules!

Web browsers are such as Google Chrome, Microsoft Edge, Internet Explorer, Mozilla Firefox, and so on.

**Don’t forget to start from “http” when you put URL.**

HTTP RULE ONE: Use port 80 (Occationally 8080)

HTTP requires port 80 when you use the web services. If you don’t know “port” well, please check the following article.

Easy! IT | Network | Port(Computer NW) | Japan Teams

HTTP RULE ONE: Stateless

When Web servers transfer files with HTTP, they don’t save any status or information after they answer requests. “One request, One response”. It’s very simple, but it’s very inconvenient when you want to buy something at online shops. To resolve this inconvenience, “Cookie” is used to manage status or something. I’ll explain the detail about “Cookie” in another article.

I hope that this article helps you to understand HTTP. Actually, HTTP is not recommended recently because of security issues. Instead of HTTP, HTTPS is adopted. I’ll also explain HTTPS in another article.