Webmaster in a Nutshell, Second Edition

Chapter 1. Introduction

This book is a compilation of some fairly diverse reference material. What links these topics is that they are crucial knowledge for today’s webmaster in a Unix environment.

In this chapter, we give the world’s quickest introduction to web technology and the role of the webmaster who breathes life into each web document. If you want to learn more about the history of the Web, how to make your web pages “cool,” the social impact of the Internet, or how to make money online, this is the wrong book.

This is a book by impatient writers for impatient readers. We’re less interested in the hype of the Web than we are in what makes it actually tick. We’ll leave it to the pundits to predict the future of the Web or to declare today’s technology already outdated. Too much analysis makes our heads spin; we just want to get our web sites online.

The Web in a Nutshell

We’ve organized this book in a roughly “outside-in” fashion—that is, with the outermost layer (HTML) first and the innermost layer (the server itself) last. But since it’s a good idea for all readers to know how everything fits together, let’s take a minute to breeze through a description of the Web from the inside-out: no history, no analysis, just the technology basics.

Clients and Servers

The tool most people use on the Web is a browser, such as Netscape Navigator, Internet Explorer, Opera, Mosaic, or Lynx. Web browsers work by connecting over the Internet to remote machines, requesting specific documents, ...