Many among us sail through our lives blissfully ignorant of the reason our web addresses start with the secret code "http//:" Increasingly we think it is superfluous because when we omit entering it into the address line of our browser, usually we arrive at our destination regardless.

I have even seen people dropping the "www." part of the web address, and they sometimes connect anyway. What does it all mean?

Lets start with HTTP - HyperText Transfer Protocol. This tongue twister tells the internet that you intend to interact with it according to a specific set of rules (protocols), and the internet will then respond according to those same rules.

Your web browser, such as Microsoft Internet Explorer(tm), is software which helps you communicate with the internet by sending your requests out and retrieving the files you are seeking.

When you search the internet or type a URL - Uniform Resource Locator, or web address into the address bar of your browser, you are in effect requesting to download and view files.

These files could be text and/or images. Your browser assembles and displays them according to more rules. This time the rules come from the language of websites HTML - Hypertext Markup Language.

When you navigate to a website, your browser looks for a file named index.htm or index.html or index.php. This file contains the basic structure of the overall site, and tells your browser what other files to look for and how to display them on your screen.

When you click on a link, your browser sends out another request, and either replaces the page you are viewing with a new page, or opens an entirely new page and displays the files depending on the rules embedded in the html code.

The WWW - World Wide Web is the huge portion of the internet which uses http:// to find websites, which in turn use HTML language for displaying files.

Thus the phrase "http://www.website.com" is basically saying:

Ms. Browser, please use the HyperText Transfer Protocol to access the World Wide Web and follow the path defined by the Uniform Resource Locator which targets the file index.htm located at the site website.com. Then display the file contents, along with other files the index page refers to, on my screen according to the rules written in the file index.htm, which is written in Hypertext Markup Language.

And the amazing thing is... it does!