CHAPTER 11
The World Wide Web
Chapters 9 and 10 explained the Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP) as a general mechanism by which clients can request documents and to which servers can respond by providing them.
Something, however, went unexplained. Why does the name of the protocol start with the word hypertext?
The answer is that HTTP was not designed simply as a new way to transfer files. It is not simply a fancy caching replacement for older file transfer protocols such as FTP (see Chapter 17). While it is certainly capable of delivering stand-alone documents such as books, images, and video, the purpose of HTTP is a much more ambitious one: ...
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