OVERVIEW

Though some of the concepts behind the World Wide Web go back as far as 1945, the technology to implement it in a practical way began to appear in the late 1980s. Initial uses of the Web were for publishing information by major universities and high-technology organizations around the world.

It wasn t until the mid-1990s that the Web began to be used for commercial applications such as content publishing, entertainment, marketing, advertising, and commerce.

This chapter will highlight some of the technologies you should understand before you begin building your own Web pages.

HOW THE WEB WORKS

The basic idea behind the Web is that documents can reside on a computer a powerful computer with specific capabilities, called a server connected to the Internet. Another computer your personal computer, called the client can request a document from the server simply by knowing the address of that document. That address, called a Universal Resource Locator (URL), gives the name of the server, the name of the document, and the document file s location on that server. When the server receives a request, it delivers the document to the requesting client computer.

CLIENTS AND SERVERS: CLIENT-SIDE APPLICATIONS

When you run a Web browser on your personal computer and request a Web page, you are the client in this transaction. When you hear about a technology being client-side, this means that it is running in conjunction with or as part of the Web browser.

Conversely, when a program or functionality is referred to as server-side, ...