Based on the definition and structure of the Internet, we’ll explain how the HTTP protocol made it possible to handle a variety of media in a single web browser and how it evolved into HTTPS to address Internet security concerns.
Let’s review the meaning of the internet as we know it. The word ‘Internet’ is a combination of the prefix ‘Inter’, meaning ‘inter’, and ‘net’, meaning ‘net’. The literal meaning of the word is “a web of different things meeting and interacting with each other”. If we abstract a bit and think about how we use the internet, this description fits. The devices we use to access the internet, such as smartphones and computers, are nodes in a giant web. We’re using this knot to talk to other knots, other people’s computing devices, and the giant servers of internet companies.
In reality, the Internet is a web of nodes all over the world. To communicate with someone on the other side of the world, we send a digital signal back and forth through countless other nodes. Just 20 years ago, there wasn’t much information that could be delivered over the internet. At best, you could send and receive structured text or small images, and media like video and music had to be delivered in a different, more specialized way. Today, you can send and receive almost any information through a single internet window. Text, email, photos, music, and video are all available through a single web browser. The development of the HTTP communication protocol is largely responsible for the ubiquity of the Internet, which doesn’t care how far information has to travel.
For example, imagine a man named Guo who wants to tell his wife that he loves her. There are many ways he can contact her, depending on his purpose. If he wants to write a letter, he can use the post office; if he wants to send a photo, he can use email; if he wants to send a small gift, he can use a courier or quick service; if he wants to make his voice heard, he can use the phone. Depending on the nature of the information you want to convey, you need to use different methods, and each service is specialized accordingly. This is similar to how the internet world looked 20 years ago. We used HTTP to deliver web pages, FTP to transfer files, POP3 to send mail, and so on. There were many other ways to communicate, depending on the type of information and how it was delivered.
However, the ubiquity of the Internet increasingly dictated a different direction of development than originally intended: for many people, the Internet was about viewing web pages in a web browser like IE or Chrome. The most readable and widely available media were still words and pictures. Attracted by the quick accessibility and convenience of the Internet, users increasingly wanted to do everything on one medium. It became inconvenient to open a mail program to send an email or an FTP program to transfer files while receiving information in a browser. HTTP in web browsers began to cannibalize all the demand. First, email communication came to the web browser, then file transfer, music playback, and video playback. HTTP’s ability to cover all media needs is largely due to the ubiquity of the technology.
Originally, HTTP was used to send and receive text or simple images. So how did HTTP come to encompass so many different media? Text passed over HTTP is “structured” text. The webpages we see in our web browsers are organized text and images, but in reality, the information is delivered in a complex, organized way. This organization is somewhat promised, and the browser uses this principle to trim and rearrange the content to present it to us. This ‘structured’ text and the ubiquity of HTTP is key.
All digital information is composed of an array of digits, made up of zeros and ones. If we know whether it’s music, a video, or a photo, we can rearrange it appropriately and transform it into something humanly recognizable. HTTP converts all media into this numeric text, and marks the type of media it is. It can carry any kind of information, as long as you know the content and type, you can restore it to its original form. The information passed over HTTP is divided into two main areas. The first is the HTTP header, and the second is the HTTP entity. The header contains information about the type and size of the content, the time it was sent, and the sender. This is called meta information. The entity contains the actual content you want to deliver. The browser looks at the headers and decides what to do with the content. If it has a translator that can process the content, it can restore it to its original form and deliver it to the user.
The way the information is handled follows a standardized form agreed upon by the world, called web standards. However, these standards are not enforced, so there are some differences between browsers. This explains why a page that looks great in one browser may not look right in another. HTTP was able to be applied universally to many different kinds of information because it was a structured way to distinguish between what to deliver and how to display it. In response to the widespread demand for universality on the Internet, HTTP’s adaptability has made it a common way of communicating. In the process, the various countries that use the Internet have worked together to define and adhere to web standards in order to unify the standards.
The universality of HTTP has been challenged by the growing diversity of demand. In particular, as “security” became an issue on the Internet, HTTP was criticized for being insecure. ActiveX, a method of adding security modules to HTTP, emerged to address this, but was eventually abandoned as it was seen as a failure that undermined HTTP’s greatest strengths: universality and convenience. It is still in use today in only a handful of countries. To address security concerns, the newly defined web standards introduced the secure HTTPS method, and the internet order is being reorganized based on it. Internet security issues have made internet-using countries and organizations around the world realize the need to react quickly to new issues and reorganize standards. However, the large number of participants in the Internet ecosystem makes it difficult to control. In the future, efforts will need to be made to organize and manage the development of the Internet ecosystem so that it can respond quickly to a wide range of opinions and user demands.
