155: HTML vs. HTTP: How Do They Compare?

There’s more than just two letters difference. In fact, you can’t really compare them at all. But you can use them together. HTML stands for Hypertext Markup Language. A well formatted HTML document though is really nothing more than a special XML document that uses certain tags. It starts out with an opening tag called html and ends with a closing html tag. Inside this, you’ll find a section enclosed with tags called head and another section enclosed with tags called body. Most of what you see in your web browser is inside the body section. You can surround text with p tags to create paragraphs, h1 tags to create a large heading, a tags to create a link that points to another HTML document, and img tags to display images. The browser uses these tags and many more to figure out how to display the document. It doesn’t display the tags themselves and instead you can think of the tags as instructions to the browser. You can create an HTML file in a text editor and save it locally on your computer. Then you can open it with your browser to view it. While this works, it’s not the way we normally get HTML files into our browsers. We normally visit web sites and what’s really happening is that the browser is requesting HTML files as well as other files from the web site. Once it has the files, it can display them. And that’s where HTTP comes into the picture. HTTP stands for Hypertext Transfer Protocol. This defines how HTML and other files are transferred to and from computers. This episode describes the following five aspects of HTTP with some examples along the way. HTTP is based on a series of requests and responses. HTTP identifies computers and files on those computers with URLs. HTTP defines methods or verbs as they’re sometimes called that you specify in your request. HTTP defines well known status codes. HTTP is stateless. Make sure to listen to the full episode or read the full transcript below for more details and some examples. Transcript Before getting too far into distributed computing, I thought it would be good to explain some basics for how one of the most distributed network works, the World wide Web or WWW. There’s a lot more to this than I can explain in this episode. For now, I just want to focus on two things, HTML and HTTP. Why should you be interested? What are they? How are they used? And how do they influence distributed computing? HTML and HTTP work together to form the backbone of the world wide web. And that forms a huge distributed computing network. A lot of people who are learning to code are introduced to HTML and CSS. I’ll explain CSS in a future episode. The main thing is that these are not programming languages. They’re ways to format and present information. In other words, it’s just data with some instructions for how that data should look when presented in a web browser. You can add some JavaScript and then you have the ability to program. HTML stands for Hypertext Markup Language. And this probably lends some credibility to this being a language. A well formatted HTML document though is really nothing more than a special XML document that uses certain tags. It starts out with an opening tag called html and ends with a closing html tag. Inside this, you’ll find a section enclosed with tags called head and another section enclosed with tags called body. Most of what you see in your web browser is inside the body section. You can surround text with p tags to create paragraphs, h1 tags to create a large heading, a tags to create a link that points to another HTML document, and img tags to display images. The browser uses these tags and many more to figure out how to display the document. It doesn’t display the tags themselves and instead you can think of the tags as instructions to the browser. You can create an HTML file in a text editor and save it locally on your computer. Then you can open it with your browse