The World Wide Web and Web Servers

The World Wide Web and Web Servers

The WWW and Web Servers

What's the World Wide Web?

The World Wide Web is an Internet service, based on a common set of protocols, which allows a particularly configured server computer to distribute documents across the Internet in a standard way. This Web standard allows programs on many different computer platforms (such as UNIX, Windows 95, and the Mac OS) to properly format and display the information served. These programs are called Web browsers.The Web is fairly unique among Internet services (which include Internet e-mail, Gopher, and FTP) in that its protocols allow for the Web server to send information of many different types (text, sound, graphics), as well as offer access to those other Internet services. Most Web browsers are just as capable of displaying UseNet newsgroup messages and Gopher sites as they are able to display Web pages written in HTML This flexibility is part of what has fueled the success and popularity of the Web. Not only do the Web protocols allow more interactive, multimedia presentations of information, but the typical Web browser can also offer its user access to other Internet resources, making a Web browser perhaps a user's most valuable Internet application.

The Hypertext Concept: Web Links

Unlike any other Internet service or protocol, the World Wide Web is based on a concept of information retrieval called hypertext. In a hypertext document, certain words within the text are marked as links to other areas of the current document or to other documents. The basic Windows help engine (and many other online help programs) uses this same hypertext concept to distribute information.

The Web Page

The World Wide Web is composed of millions of Web pages, each of which is served to a browser (when requested) one page at a time. A Web page is generally a single HTML document, which might include text, graphics, sound files, and hypertext links. Each HTML document you create is a single Web page, regardless of the length of the document or the amount of information included.

The Web Site

A Web site, then, is a collection of Web pages under the control of a particular person or group. Generally, a Web site offers a certain amount of organization of its internal information. You might start with an index or default page for a Web site, and then use hypertext links to access more detailed information. Another page within the Web site may offer links to other interesting sites on the Web, information about the organization, or just about anything else.

Web site organization is an important consideration for any HTML designer, including those designing and building corporate Web sites. The typical corporate Web site needs to offer a number of different types of information, each of which might merit its own Web page or pages.

Hypermedia: Text and Graphics on the Web

With graphical browsers such as NCSA Mosaic and Netscape Navigator, the hypertext concept of the Web was introduced to the world of multimedia, resulting in the hypermedia links that are possible in HTML.

Now, this really isn't much different from the hypertext links we talked about in the previous section-the only difference is that hypermedia links point to files other than HTML documents. For instance, a hypermedia link might point to an audio file, a QuickTime movie file, or a graphic file such as a GIF- or JPEG-format graphic