Do-It-Yourself Ecommerce

Now that we know the address we need a common format, or protocol, to communicate. TCP/IP - Transport Control Protocol/Internet Protocol is what your computer uses to communicate with the outside world, whether the Internet or other computers on a local network.

The http that you see at the beginning of a web address stands for HyperText Transfer Protocol. It simply provides the standards of communication between the client and the server. Other protocols are FTP (File Transfer Protocol) and SMTP (Simple Mail Transfer Protocol).

The www means World Wide Web, as mentioned earlier, but it also means that the language it uses is HTML or HyperText Markup Language. HTML is simply regular text with predefined tags that allow the browser to show the page as the designer intended. Browsers have since expanded their abilities to allow other languages that can provide pictures, sound, video and even animated dancing babies.

To complete the lesson by throwing one more acronym at you, the complete web address is known as the URL, or Uniform Resource Locator. In other words, http://www.yourdomain.com/index.html takes you to the home page of the site in your domain.