Black and white Computer

The purpose of HTTP is simply to provide a common ‘language’ in which the browser and the Web server can exchange information about Web pages and other resources. The real substance of the exchange, when the browser requests a Web page, is the section of the response that describes how the page will appear inside the browser window. The description of the Web page that the server sends is in a standard format, so that the browser can understand how the Web server wants it to display the page. This time the standard format is not in fact a protocol, because it does not define how two computers exchange information. It is actually a language, although the distinction is fine: there are rules about computer languages just as there are about a network protocols. The language that Web servers and browsers use to describe a Web page is Hypertext Markup Language (HTML). HTML is a language that is used primarily to format data on a page. It doesn’t contain any advanced support for doing com...