Domain Name Protocols & Their Effect On Your Reputation

Chapter 1.3, in which we examine the effect domain name protocols can have on your digital reputation.

🖼️ David Erickson/Midjourney - a stylized image of a circuit board

In this section of Chapter 1, we will examine the technology protocols that allow domain names to work on the web; we will also discuss some security protocols that can be applied to a domain name and the reputational signals they generate.  

HyperText Transfer Protocol (HTTP)

The HyperText Transfer Protocol (HTTP) is the foundation of the World Wide Web. It enables your browser to retrieve web pages and other documents and allows web servers to deliver them to your browser. 

Without HTTP we couldn’t link one web page to another or to a PDF file or to software to download. Without HTTP, we couldn’t embed images on our web pages nor could we include YouTube videos on our pages. HyperText Transfer Protocol is baked into the web programming language, HTML (HyperText Markup Language) to enable linking to various assets online. 

When you type in the domain name of a website you want to visit and hit Return, or when you click on a link to a web page in an email or search results, the results of HTTP are set into motion.  

HTTP works by sending requests from the client (your browser or email software) to the server (the computer that hosts website content), and then sending responses from the server back to the client. 

Each request and response is made up of a set of headers, which contain information about the request or response, and a body, which contains the actual data being transmitted.

When your web browser wants to retrieve a web page, it first looks up information about the domain name you are requesting a page from in the form of a Domain Name System lookup. That request translates the domain name into the IP address we’ve discussed earlier in this chapter.