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Introducing Python, 2nd Edition
book

Introducing Python, 2nd Edition

by Bill Lubanovic
November 2019
Beginner
630 pages
12h 20m
English
O'Reilly Media, Inc.
Audiobook available
Content preview from Introducing Python, 2nd Edition

Chapter 18. The Web, Untangled

Oh, what a tangled web we weave…

Walter Scott, Marmion

Straddling the French–Swiss border is CERN—a particle physics research institute that smashes atoms multiple times, just to make sure.

All that smashing generates a mountain of data. In 1989, the English scientist Tim Berners-Lee first circulated a proposal within CERN to help disseminate information there and across the research community. He called it the World Wide Web and distilled its design into three simple ideas:

HTTP (Hypertext Transfer Protocol)

A protocol for web clients and servers to interchange requests and responses.

HTML (Hypertext Markup Language)

A presentation format for results.

URL (Uniform Resource Locator)

A way to uniquely represent a server and a resource on that server.

In its simplest usage, a web client (I think Berners-Lee was the first to use the term browser) connected to a web server with HTTP, requested a URL, and received HTML.

This was all built on the networking base from the internet, which at the time was noncommercial, and known only to a few universities and research organizations.

He wrote the first web browser and server on a NeXT1 computer. Web awareness really expanded in 1993, when a group of students at the University of Illinois released the Mosaic web browser (for Windows, the Macintosh, and Unix) and the NCSA httpd server. When I downloaded Mosaic that summer and started building sites, I had no idea that the web and the internet would ...

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Publisher Resources

ISBN: 9781492051374Errata Page