Hypertext Transfer Protocol

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Hypertext Transfer Protocol or HTTP is a communications protocol for the exchange of information on intranets and the Internet. Originally, HTTP was used to publish and retrieve hypertext pages on the Internet.

HTTP development was coordinated by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) and the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF). HTTP/1.1 is the version of HTTP in common use.

HTTP is a request/response standard between a client or end-user and server or web site. The client makes an HTTP request using a browser (or other end-user tool), and is referred to as the user agent. The responding server is called the origin server. In between the user agent and origin server may be several intermediaries, like proxies and gateways. The most popular application of HTTP on the Internet is TCP/IP and the supporting layers, however, HTTP is not limited to these protocols.

In most cases, an HTTP client makes a request from an origin server. A Transmission Control Protocol (TCP) connection is made to a particular port on a host (port 80 by default; see List of TCP and UDP Ports). Upon receiving the request, the origin server sends back a status line, such as "HTTP/1.1 200 OK", and a message of its own, the body of which is perhaps the requested file, an error message, or some other information.

To access resources via HTTP, Uniform Resource Identifiers (URIs) (more specifically, Uniform Resource Locators (URLs)) use the http or https URI schemes.