eli5;How can http transfer video, audio and files not containing hypertext when it is a ‘Hyper Text Tranfer protocol’

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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

5 Answers

Anonymous 0 Comments

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).

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