Home » Dictionary Articles »

YourDictionary defines http as an acronym for hypertext transfer protocol. This protocol was designed to provide a standard that could be used to publish and share hypertext pages between computers.

Typically, when a user is viewing a page on the Internet, strings of text or images function as links. When a link is clicked on by the user's computer mouse, the user will be taken to another hypertext page. This intertwined type of communication provides the background for the Internet. The Internet can be thought of as nothing more than an interconnected collective of hypertext pages.

Although the computer programming origins of the acronym http are very arcane and technical, this term has become increasingly commonplace due to the overwhelming influence of the World Wide Web. The command http:// precedes most every public Internet address in the world. To understand how this works, consider what occurs when a user types the Internet address http://www.yourdictionary.com into his or her Web browser. The command http:// is used to tell the Web server where www.yourdictionary.com is hosted that the user is requesting a hypertext page from that server. The server finds the appropriate hypertext file and sends it back to the user using hyper text transfer protocol where it is then displayed in their browser.

It's important to understand that a server is just a computer on the Internet where files are stored. However, many different types of files can be stored on the same server and that different protocols can be used to transmit those files. For example, another common transport protocol is ftp, which stands for file transfer protocol. Ftp was initially designed to transfer large files across the Internet.

On the same server where the hyper text file for YourDictionary.com is stored, another file called ftp://www.yourdictionary.com could be stored. In this instance, when a user makes this type of request, the ftp:// at the beginning of the address tells the server to send the correct page back to the user using file transfer protocol and not hyper text transfer protocol. To the user, data is being sent back and forth, but the speed the data travels at and how it is routed through the tunnels and gateways of the Internet is governed by the type of protocols that carry the data.