The wikipedia for http says
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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
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.
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