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ECommerce >>
Internet Protocols
HTTP
HTTP is the protocol that a Web
browser uses to access and retrieve Web pages. All World Wide Web pages are
transferred over the Internet using this system. Web addresses (or URLs)
begin with the letters http:// - this lets the browser know it is suppose to
be accessing a Web server. The Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP) is an
application-level protocol with the lightness and speed necessary for
distributed, collaborative, hypermedia information systems. HTTP has been in
use by the world-wide Web global information initiative since 1990.
HTTP is not a protocol for
transferring hypertext; rather, it is a protocol for transmitting
information with the efficiency necessary for marking hypertext jumps. The
data transferred by the protocol can be plain text, hypertext, audio,
images, or any Internet-accessible information. HTTP is a
transaction-oriented client-server protocol. The most typical use of HTTP is
between a web browser and a web server. To provide reliability, HTTP makes
use of TCP.
Each transaction is treated
independently. A typical implementation will create a new TCP connection
between client and server for each transaction and then terminate the
connection as soon as the transaction completes, although the specification
does not dictate this one-to-one relationship between transaction and
connection lifetimes. Another important feature of HTTP is that it is
flexible in the formats that it can handle. When a browser issues a request
to a server, it may include a prioritised list of formats that it can
handle, and the server replies with the appropriate format.
Understanding
Internet addresses
What is a URL?
What does it mean?
How do web addresses work?
URL stands for Uniform Resource
Locator and is another name for an Internet or web address. A web address is
composed of four parts:
A protocol name
The location of the site
The name of the organisation
that maintains the site
A suffix that identifies the
kind of organisation it is
For example, a dot com is used
for a commercial organisation and a dot co dot uk is used for a company that
trades in the United Kingdom. For example, the address-
http://www.myknowledgemap.com provides the
following information: http: This web server uses Hypertext Transfer
Protocol www dot - This site is on the World Wide Web. myknowledgemap - The
web server is at the myknowledgemap Company. dot com - This is a commercial
institution. |
