2019-02-22T01:31:28Z
network protocol
protocol
This refers to the formal grammar and semantics of communication over (in our case) a digital network. We can think of a network protocol as an analogous design problem to a file format, in that it's some definite representation of data, albeit with an emphasis on transporting it rather than storing it. Network protocols also tend to (but not always) model some kind of conversational state between two or more systems, and are therefore potentially more complex to specify than a data format.