What is Http?
Yep, I suppose this is a great place to start! What the heck is HTTP?
Well if you are more than 20 years old you would probably remember having to physically type HTTP in front of a web address. These days this has become redundant seeing the browser you use will add in the prefix.
When the internet started a lot of the ‘crude undercarriage’ technologies were exposed to the non-technical public. These then became commonplace despite 99% of people now knowing what they meant!
Eventually, these technologies became more hidden so today you can just type a web address into a browser and it will ‘resolve’ to the correct address – HTTP or HTTPS.
HTTP stands for Hyper Text Transfer Protocol – and the S in HTTPS stands for Secure (encrypted).
In simple terms, this is just a way for two things on the internet – in this case – a browser and a web server (website) – to know what language to talk with each other in. The language is HTTP. So a protocol is basically a kind of language.
Thankfully you don’t usually need to type the protocol into a web browser these days – and thanks to Google pushing encrypted internet sites – now most of the web runs on HTTPS.
So now you know unless you are Geek, you don’t need to know anything more about HTTP!
So what is HTTP/1 HTTP/2 and now HTTP/3?
These are just the different versions that HTTP has gone through over its lifetime.
Each new version – like all IT systems – is usually a big improvement on the previous version.
Since its advent, the Internet has gone through massive upgrades but change has not been fast in the case of HTTP.
HTTP/1 was released in 1996 so it’s taken a long time to finally get to version 3!
The reason for this slow growth is that these internet protocols are globally recognised standards hard-wired into everything that uses the Internet. So you can imagine it’s hard to change things fast when so many people are involved and so many hard-wired systems are affected.
So HTTP/3 should be a great celebration – it’s been years in creation and is now ready to launch.
Kinsta has a great article about Http/3.
What I like about Kinsta is that as a company they are always on the ball with new technologies making them a leading website Hosting Provider.
