What are protocols?

In very general terms, protocols provide the syntactic and semantic rules for communication. That is, they are a standard to govern communication between peer processes at the same level (i.e. application, transport, internet, or subnet levels) on different systems. For example, they allow us to discuss computer communications independent of any particular vendor’s network or hardware.

• TCP/IP (short for Transmission Control Protocol and the Internet Protocol) are designed to provide a universal interconnection among computers, independent of the particular networks to which they attach. The distinguishing features of TCP/IP services include: network technology independence; universal interconnection; end-to-end acknowledgements; and application protocol standards (e.g. emails, file transfer, remote login applications)

• HTTP (Hypertext Transfer Protocol) is the world wide web standard for browser-webserver application program exchange