The WWW has changed advertising from printed media to interactive multimedia. The combination of text with video, animation, and photographs has created an exciting new way to distribute information about products, companies, or almost any form of information. Specialized browsers decode the files, created using Hypertext Markup Language (HTML) or Java, and display them according to rules defined in the browser application. Browsers are applications resident on user computers.

The Hypertext Transport Protocol (HTTP) supports the transfer of files stored on dedicated servers. These files are unlike text or data files. The files are coded using HTML, which is derived from Standardized Generic Markup Language (SGML). Text files are coded with special characters that identify which characters are headings and which characters are underlined, and so forth.

Images can be referenced as well, without being a part of the file. A reference is inserted into the file to point to the location of another file. When the file is opened by a special-purpose viewer application, the user sees the text displayed according to the coding and the images referenced in the source file.

Images and text files do not have to be collocated. In fact, text and image files can be located anywhere on the Internet and linked to the main file by references in the text. This allows files to be maintained locally rather than downloaded to a central server somewhere that must be maintained by a central authority.

To access an HTTP server,...