The wikipedia for http says
“`
The Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP) is an application layer protocol for distributed, collaborative, hypermedia information systems.
“`
I searched the word hypermedia and it seems to be the extension of hypertext to include video, audio etc. But nowhere in the wikipedia it says that HTTP transfers hypermedia instead of hypertext. It just says that it is used for hypermedia information systems.
So shouldn’t the full form of HTTP be Hypermedia Transfer Protocol ?
In: Technology
There is nothing in http that is particularly specific to hypertext. The protocol is a fairly simple “downloader”: the client connects to the server, asks for a particular “file” and the server sends the bytes.
Http is completely independent of html, which really is particularly suitable for hypertext. They just happen to have been invented as part of the same project, the world wide web. A web browser can use http to download html and then display it, or it can use http to download a video and save it to disk, etc.
By the way, in the case of audio and video, a lot of that is not done using http, since http is not that good for streaming media.
(Http is a little more complicated than I made it seem, but not much).
Because while it’s original purpose was to only transfer text, it was extended to support other formats, but the name remained. We also use HTTP today for things like web services which are far from hypertext.
As for how it actually works, the server’s response includes a
“Content-Type” header which says what kind of content it is serving, such as “text/html”, “image/jpg”, “audio/mpeg” and “video/mp4”. It also includes another header “Content-Length” which tells the client exactly how long the response is. Alternatively the response can be in “chunks” where the server sends pieces of the file, with each piece preceded by its length.
Are you asking how it actually works to transfer audio and video over http, or are you asking why the name is what it is?
Http is just a name. All it is is a specific method to go to a server and say “can you send me this file, please?”. While the file originally was intended to be text the protocol has no qualms about sending non-text related data when asked to do so.
Old protocol names often don’t get updated as capabilities expand. Nothing else to add that hasn’t already been said
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