Website Overview

A Web site consists of various applications that provide communications with client browsers. Using various technologies, a Web site can provide interactive content using back-end data as well as information provided by the user.

What Is Web?
The World Wide Web, or simply The Web, is a distributed, hypertext-based information system developed that uses various standard technologies.

Web pages are ordinary files with .htm or .html file extensions.

The following list provide a general overview of the Web and its underlying technologies:

• The underlying network (i.e., Internet, corporate intranet) provides the communications medium over which the Web operates.
• The HyperText Transfer Protocol (HTTP) provides a common application-level protocol for the transfer of data.
• The HyperText Markup Language (HTML) provides a standard presentation-level standard format for describing the structure of documents.
• Servers connected to the network respond to requests from browsers.
• Browsers provide the mechanism for users to access and view hypertext documents. Browsers also use other standard protocols (i.e., FTP, NNTP, WAIS, gopher) for file transfer and Usenet access.

How Does It Work?
The basic steps involved in Web-based communications are as follows:

• The user enters a URL into a browser or clicks on a link on a page to activate a URL.
• The browser resolves the address of the server noted in the URL using a configuration specific Domain Name Server (DNS).
• The browser connects to the server.
• The browser issues a request for a page to the server.
• The server sends the HTML of the requested page to the browser.
• The browser builds the textual content and requests any additional images or applications (e.g., Java applets).
• The server sends the requested information
• The browser displays the sent information.

Of course, as with anything, the underlying operation is much more complicated. The intricacies of the operation are, however, hidden so that you only have to do a few things to make a page display in your browser.

A Web Client is any host machine that runs a Web browser or other application that can communicate with a Web Server. The Web Server runs software that provides services to any requesting client. The image depicts data flow from the Web Server to the Web Client.