Web Standards Programmer's Reference: HTML, CSS, JavaScript®, Perl, Python®, and PHP

1.1. What Is the World Wide Web?

The Internet is a worldwide network of computers all attached in a global networking scheme. This scheme, known as TCP/IP, assigns and uses unique addresses to communicate between computers on the Internet.

The World Wide Web is a network of computers that, using the Internet, are able to exchange text, graphics, and even multimedia content using standard protocols. Web servers—special computers that are set up for the distinct purpose of delivering content—are placed on the Internet with specific content for others to access. Web clients—which are generally desktop computers but can also be dedicated terminals, mobile devices, and more—access the servers' content via a browser. The browser is a specialized application for displaying Web content.

For example, Google maintains many Web servers that connect to their database of content found on the Web. You use your home or office PC to connect to the servers via a browser such as Microsoft's Internet Explorer or Mozilla's Firefox (shown in Figure 1-1).

Figure 1-1. Figure 1-1

If you were to make a diagram of the relationships between all the technical components involved in requesting and delivering a document over the Web, it would resemble the diagram shown in Figure 1-2.

Figure 1-2. Figure 1-2

1.1.1. Creating a Web

The Web was created as a replacement for the aging Gopher protocol. Gopher ...