So I have to be honest with you, I hate writing. In ninth grade, my honors English teacher declared to the class that our entire grade had failed the entry-level grammar exam except for one student who had not attended our unaccredited school the year prior. Then followed a grueling school year of intense English studies, which squeezed out all pride or joy I felt while writing. So immediately after my last post, we were assigned the task of crafting a blog post on the concept of HTTP and FTP. I'm sure you can visualize how I bounced for joy at the thought of writing a post on that easy task. Well, here goes nothing.
What is FTP and HTTP?
(as I understand it so far)
When we type in a web address, we all see the HTTPS:// (or the increasingly rare HTTP://). What does that little sting of letters mean? It stands for "hypertext transfer protocol" (every time I come across a definition like this, I can't help but think, "well, those are words.") It turns out HTTP sets a set of rules that your browser follows. It allows the browser to make requests of a server or a program located on another machine somewhere else.
A Web page is a hypertext document. It uses hypertext, or a simplified easy programming language called HTML. That text can be links to other web pages or files located on other servers. HTTP: and Https handle security differently, with HTTPS being much more secure.
(There is a lot more to learn about the hypertext transfer protocol. However, My brain starts to melt when trying to read articles about the minutia of HTTP, so I will have to leave it there. )
Now onto our second topic, FTP. Back in the mid-2000s, I stopped building websites because I couldn't find a reliably free FTP and didn't fully understand what it was. Too bad I didn't have this blog to explain it to me.
FTP stands for file transfer protocol. Unlike HTTP, FTP doesn't need to translate code for the browser. FTP is a method to directly place or copy files into another piece of software located on a machine somewhere else. Webpages can use FTPs, but that goes through the HTTP protocol. The file transfer protocol is specifically for transferring files to the server regardless of whether a webpage uses them or not. The students at PE use this to share our projects and files among ourselves. We use an SFTP rather than an FTP, and that S also stands for secure.
Well, that's all I understand about FTP and HTTPS so far. If you want to learn more check out the MDN articles on HTTP or their handy instructions on using an FTP to upload your files onto a server.
There are much more fun things to read, learn and write about with web design, so I am glad I can officially wrap this one up.
I've been waiting for HTTP2 to arrive. Apparently, it's been here for a while already and as of 2022 - there's HTTP3! Time to learn a little more about that ;)