Difference Between HTTP and WWW

HTTP vs WWW
HTTP is an acronym for Hypertext Transfer Protocol; this is the most popular protocol in use today. It is the communication standard used by your web browser in order to communicate with the server of the website that you are viewing. WWW or the World Wide Web is a prefix to a certain name in order to identify that it is a web site that you are visiting.

There are many existing protocols in the internet today and in order to differentiate which one you want to use, they are given specific protocol names that should be present when connecting to a web site or any other source of data. Some protocols that are accepted by browsers are: HTTP, HTTPS, FTP, NEWS, and FILE. Although most sites are purely web servers, some sites host multiple services in a single domain name and in order to identify which one you are trying to access you must indicate the protocol that the service uses. You can see what protocol is currently in use by looking at the first word in the address bar.

Most websites come in a certain format, mostly it is www.anything.com. The word at the end identifies the site as commercial, the word in the middle is the domain name, and the WWW in the beginning indicates that it is a website and it uses the HTTP protocol. It is therefore redundant to have “http://www.anything.com” since the WWW tells the browser to use HTTP when it is already in use. But because most people are already used to having a URI written this way, it is left as is by most experts.

Aside from the protocol names that are already reserved for obvious reasons, you can use any other prefix in order to establish a sub domain on your site. A sub domain can be a totally different web site that is sharing the domain name. In the case of sub domains, you can no longer use a prefix in order to identify the protocol in use, that is why you must specify the protocol by using HTTP://, FTP://, or any other protocol name.

Summary:

1. HTTP is the protocol used to transfer data to and from the website.
2. WWW is the identifier that indicates that it is a web site and it uses the HTTP protocol.
3. HTTP://anything.com, WWW.anything.com, HTTP://WWW.anything.com leads to the same site.
4. Any prefix that is not reserved to a protocol can be used as a sub domain.