Ryan: The web?
Wife: Yeah.
Ryan: Hmm. Well, it’s all pretty amazing really. And the funny thing is that it’s all very undervalued. The protocol I was talking about, HTTP, it’s capable of all sorts of neat stuff that people ignore for some reason.
Wife: You mean http like the beginning of what I type into the browser?
Ryan: Yeah. That first part tells the browser what protocol to use. That stuff you type in there is one of the most important breakthroughs in the history of computing.
Ryan went down a completely different path than I would have. I don't think most people who ask how the web works care about the http protocol. At least I wouldn't, if I didn't know better. I think I'd be more interested in how the network infrastructure is laid out and how requests get from my computer to a server and the data back and rendered. http is really just an implementation detail (people did this far before http existed).