When entering this or that address in the search bar of the browser, almost no one thinks about the meaning of the strange abbreviations www and http. They are considered the same integral attribute of the site address as the indication of the domain zone, but in the modern world these abbreviations are more of an atavism.
The inventor of the WWW and HTTP is the British scientist Tim Berners-Lee, who proposed using the Internet to facilitate the work with documents in the organization where he worked.
To understand what www and http mean in a site address, as well as to understand why they are needed, you need to look into the history of the world wide web. The Internet was invented in 1989 as a means of storing and transmitting data in hypertext format. Hypertext refers here to a way of organizing information by building links and links. In a general sense, hypertext is any text that contains links to other texts, for example, an encyclopedia. The website is also a collection of hypertext documents.
What is WWW?
Tim Berners-Lee also authored the world's first website that compiled server building and browser tutorials.
Technologies in the early 90s of the last century were just evolving, so different servers were used for different needs. For example, there were separate servers for transferring files (ftp), for sending e-mail (mail), and for accessing hypertext documents (www). The abbreviation WWW is derived from the World Wide Web, which translates as the World Wide Web. Very often the World Wide Web is confused with the Internet, although in reality the Internet is just a set of computers connected into a common network, and the WWW is one of the means of data transmission. Since it is the World Wide Web that is the most popular way to use the Internet, the prefix www is often omitted in the site address, since by default it is assumed that the user is interested in hypertext.
Hypertext protocol
As for HTTP, this abbreviation is also formed by abbreviating the concept of HyperText Transfer Protocol, that is, "Hypertext Transfer Protocol." This refers to a specific coding and data processing standard that allows users to view web pages in the form of hypertext documents. The http protocol works according to the following scheme: the client forms a request and addresses it to the server, which processes this request and sends the result to the client. Over time, http began to be used not only for hypertext, but also for other types of data, so modern browsers automatically use it, unless otherwise specifically indicated, for example, the ftp file transfer protocol.
