INTERNET TECHNOLOGIES

The Internet

The Internet is a global system of interconnected governmental, academic, corporate, public and
private computer networks. The Internet is a medium of sharing information globally with ease and
speed. In this digital age, more and more of what we do is somehow related to the Internet; job
application, business and marketing, education, communication, etc. The Internet is a global
interconnected network of millions of computers together. Information that travels over the Internet
does so via a variety of languages known as protocols. The Internet is a cooperative endeavour—no
organization is in charge of the Internet. The Internet is based on the networking technologies of the
Internet Protocol Suite. Every computer in the Internet is identified by a unique Internet Protocol (IP)
address. The Internet is accessible to every user all over the world.

Internet Evolution

The concept of the Internet originated in 1969 and has undergone several technological and
infrastructural changes. The Internet originated from the Advanced Research Projects Agency
Network (ARPANET). ARPANET was developed by DARPA of the United States Department of
Defense. The purpose of ARPANET was to provide communication among the various bodies of
government. In 1972, the ARPANET spread over the globe with 23 nodes located at different
countries and thus became known as Internet. As the Internet grew, it was used for applications
beyond research, such as electronic mail. In the early 1980s, the current versions of the core Internet
protocols, Transmission Control Protocol (TCP) and Internet Protocol (IP), were introduced. In 1991,
the Center for European Nuclear Research (CERN) released the first versions of World Wide Web
(WWW) software. The invention of new technologies such as Transmission Control
Protocol/Internet Protocol (TCP/IP), WWW, domain name system (DNS), browsers, scripting
languages etc., provided a medium to publish and access information over the web.

Edited by [email protected]

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The World Wide Web (WWW)

The World Wide Web (WWW) is a way of accessing information in the Internet. The World Wide
Web was created by Timothy Berners Lee in 1989 at CERN in Geneva. The World Wide Web came
into existence as a proposal to allow researchers to work together effectively and efficiently at CERN.
Eventually it became World Wide Web. The WWW project merges the techniques of network
information and hypertext to make an easy but powerful global information system.

The web uses the HTTP (hypertext transfer protocol), which is only one of the many “languages”
spoken over the Internet, to transmit data. HTTP is a simple data transfer protocol that binds the web
together and supports the communications between a web client (browser) and its web server. HTTP
consists of a set of messages and replies for both servers and browsers and relies on the universal
resource identifier (URI), enclosed in the universal resource locator (URL), to identify files. The web
utilizes special software called browsers to access web documents (more commonly known as web
pages) that are linked to each other via hyperlinks. Web pages contain some or all of the following:
text, images, audio and video.

A web browser is used as a client on the web to support users requests, connect to a web server using
URL information, format and display the responding information (from the web server). A web
server listens for incoming requests from a web browser to find the requested document and transmit
information to the browser or find a program and execute it. A URL is the address of web resource
that leads to a file, a single record in a database, the front-end of an Internet program or a result of a
query. For example

http://www.kasu.edu.ng/

The http:// enables a web browser to locate and display the web page or website. Most browsers will
automatically add this prefix. The www stands for world wide web. This means that the page is
somewhere on the world wide web. For some websites, it is not necessary to type in the “www” part.
The text “kasu” is the name of the web page or website (or the host). It is flanked by dots on either
side which separate it from other sections of the web address. The edu.ng is the top level domain
name for educational institutions in Nigeria. This indicates where the web page is registered, and
often tells what kind of website it is.

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The WWW works on client-server approach using the following steps:

 User enters the URL (example http://www.google.com) of a web page in the address bar of
a web browser.
 Then the browser sends a request to the domain name server for the IP address corresponding
to www.google.com.

• After receiving the IP address, the browser sends the request for web page to the web server
using the HTTP protocol, which specifies the way the browser and web server communicates.

 Then web server receives request using HTTP protocol and searches for the requested web
page. If found it returns it back to the web browser and closes the HTTP connection.
 Now the web browser receives the web page, interprets it and display the contents of web
page in web browser’s window.

A website is a collection of web pages that can be identified using a domain name. Websites
can be accessible to the whole world via the Internet, or can be a private affair available only
to users in an organization. There are private and public websites. Private websites are called
Intranet servers, which are used by internal users in an organization. Private websites are set-
up inside a firewall to protect access from external users, but shared by all internal users
across many types of local area TCP/IP based computer network. Public websites are
accessible by users through the Internet. Public websites are normally placed on a web server
that has Internet connection, which is maintained by the owner of the website or an
organisation that provides web hosting services.

There are advantages and disadvantages in setting up a web server by an organisation to host
a website or having a website hosted by a web hosting organisation. Setting up a web server
within an organisation provides complete control over the operations of the server and ability
to use server scripts that interact with other systems in the organisation. However, the
organisation needs to connect the web server to the Internet and provide an administrator for
the web server. On the other hand, having a website hosted by a web hosting organisation
relieves an organisation from the need for a high speed Internet connection, hardware and
software to set up a web server. However, the website must be managed remotely and the

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 owner of the website will give up the ability to write server scripts and integrate the website
with other system.

Search Engines

Search engine refers to a huge database of Internet resources such as web pages, newsgroups,
programs and images. It enables users to locate information on World Wide Web. Users can
search for any information by passing a query in form of keywords or a phrase. It then
searches for relevant information in its database and return to the user. There are three basic
components of a search engine; web crawler, database and search interfaces.

The web crawler is a software component that traverses the web to gather information.
Information on the web is stored in database, which consists of huge web resources. Search
interface is the component that resides between a user and the database. It helps the user to
search through the database. The web crawler, database and search interface components
make the search engine work. Search engines make use of Boolean expression AND, OR and
NOT to restrict and widen the results of a search. To search for a web resource, the following
are the steps are performed by a search engine:

 The search engine looks for the keyword in the index for predefined database instead of going
directly to the web to search for the keyword.
 The search engine then uses the web crawler to search for the information in the database.
 Once web crawler finds the pages, the search engine then shows the relevant web pages as a
result, which include title of the pages, size of text portion, first several sentences etc. The
search criteria may vary from one search engine to the other. The retrieved information is
ranked according to various factors such as frequency of keywords, relevancy of information,
links etc.

• A user can then select any of the search results to open the web resource using a web browser.

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Electronic Mail

Electronic mail, or e-mail, is a fast, easy and inexpensive way to communicate with other Internet
users around the world. It is one of the basic and earliest services of the Internet and the most used
application on the Internet too. E-mail overcomes most of the problems and delays of getting a
physical document from one person to another. Rather, it has the dual advantage of being faster

File Transfer Protocol (FTP)

The File Transfer Protocol (FTP) is a system of rules and a software program that enables a user to
log on to another computer and transfer information between the two computers. It was the first
service developed for the Internet so that government and educational institutions could easily
exchange files. FTP allows the user to get access to the files stored in the directory of a remote
computer that is connected to the Internet. Using FTP, a user can upload and download files from
the remote computer (known as FTP servers), with access permission on the remote machine.

Telnet

Telnet is a protocol that allows a user to log on to a remote computer. Telnet is also known as remote
login, which means connecting one machine to another in such a way that a person may interact with
another machine as if it is being used locally.

Internet Relay Chat (IRC)

The Internet Relay Chat (IRC) is a service on the Internet that allows people to communicate in real
time and carry on conversations via the computer with one or more people. It provides the user with
the facility to engage in simultaneous (synchronous) online conversation with other users from
anywhere in the world.

Chatting and Instant Messaging

Chart programs allow users on the Internet to communicate with each other by typing in real time.
They are sometimes included as a feature of a website, where users can log into chat rooms to
exchange comments and information about the topics addressed on the site.

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Internet Telephony

Internet telephone is the use of the Internet rather than the traditional telephone company
infrastructure, to exchange spoken or other telephonic information. It consists of hardware and
software that enable people to use the Internet as a transmission medium for telephone calls. There
are many Internet telephony applications available. Some, Internet telephony applications such as
Cool Talk and NetMeeting, come bundled with popular web browsers.

Video Conferencing

Video conferencing uses the same technology as IRC, but also provides sound and video pictures. It
enables direct face-to-face communication across networks. A video conferencing system has two or
more parties in different locations, which have the ability to communicate using a combination of
video, audio and data. A video conference can be person to person (referred to as “point-to-point”)
or can involve more than two people (referred to as “multipoint”) and the video conferencing
terminals are often referred to as “endpoints”.

Newsgroups (Usenet)

Newsgroups are international discussion groups that focus on a particular topic and help in gathering
information about the topic. The information or articles that make up the “news” are written by
people interested in a specific topic. These articles are posted to the newsgroup so that others can
read, reply and comment on them.

Mailing Lists (List server)

The Internet is home to a large community of individuals who carry out active discussions, organized
around topic-oriented forums that are distributed via e-mail. This method of Internet communications
is known as mailing list and it enables people with similar interests from all over the world to
communicate and share information with each other.

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The Web Concept

The Web was developed to be a pool of human knowledge, and human culture, which would allow
collaborators in remote sites to share their ideas and all aspects of a common project.

The Web consists of a vast assortment of files and documents that are stored on thesecomputers and
written in some form of Hyper Text Markup Language (HTML) thattells browsers how to display
the information. The computers that store the files arecalled servers because they can serve requests
from many users at the same time. Users access these HTML files and documents via applications
called browsers.

The main Web concepts are:

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Web Page

The Web page is a space of information on the Internet that presents informationabout a particular
person, business, or organization or cause.
 The Web consists of files, called Web pages (documents).

 It is containing links to resources (text, images, audios, videos, and other data),
throughout the Internet

Web Site

Web site can be defined as a collection of web pages which are grouped together and usually
connected together in various ways. Often called a "web site" or simply a "site." The web site
usually presents information about a particular person, business,organization or cause.
Generally, there are two types of website styles, Static and Dynamic website:

 A static Website is one that has web pages stored on the server in the sameform as the
user will view them.

 A dynamic Website is one that does not have web pages stored on the serverin the same
form as the user will view them. Instead, the web page content changes automatically
and/or frequently based on certain criteria. There are two meaning for dynamic website.
The first is that the web page code is constructed dynamically, piece by piece. The second
one is that the web pagecontent displayed varies based on certain criteria. The criteria may
be pre- defined rules or may be based on variable user input.

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The Web Terms

Uniform Resource Locator (URL)

It is the complete address of World Wide Web page and consists of a three components that
identifies where the web page is stored on the Internet. These partsare: the protocol, the site name,
and the absolute path to the document or resource asshown in the following example

 protocol name (e.g., HTTP)

http:// The first thing the URL does is define the protocol that will be used for that
particular transaction. The letters HTTP let the server know to use Hypertext Transfer
Protocol, or get into “web mode.”

 domain name/ hostname (servers address that a user wants to connect with), for example,
www.google.com. www.example.com The next portionof the URL identifies the website
by its domain name. In this example, the domain name is example.com. The “www.” part
at the beginning is the particular host name at that domain. For example, there might also
be development.example.com, clients.example.com, and so on.
 File name is optional, implies the access to a file/directory into the principalwebpage.

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 /2012/samples/first.html This is the absolute path through directories on the server to the
requested HTML document, first.html. The words separated by slashes are the directory
names, starting with the root directory of the host.

Example: http://www.icci.org/studies/ips.html .

1. Protocol: http.

2. Host computer name: www.

3. Second-level domain name: icci.

4. Top-level domain name: org.

5. Directory name: studies.

6. File name: ips.html.

Several Top-level domains are common:

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Web hosting

After we create a website, it is necessary to store it in a place where it is always available for users.
We use Web hosting services/companies for this purpose. Theyown web servers that have the
ability to store content.

Search engine

Search engines allow us to search in the Internet for information, images and other types of files
stored in various locations available throughout the network. Search engines work according to
certain algorithms that show the user relevant, requested search results. At first, information from
the various websites is collected and storedand then analyzed to organize and save them in the
database for future use. When a user enters an inquiry into the search engine, the database is
organized by an index and the user is presented with results that match best the entered search
terms. Therefore, it is important to understand that by using the search engine one does notsearch
the entire Internet but the search engine’s database. Therefore, we might get different results each
time we use different web engines.

4. Internet protocols

 TCP/IP protocol: TCP / IP: This protocol is the main protocol for Internet communication. It
defines the rules that computers need to follow to communicate with other computers via a
network.

 HTTP (Hypertext Transfer protocol): is a network protocol that ensures the exchange of
almost all types of resources on the web. With resources, we mean files, pages, images, search
results, etc. It is basically, the web browsers languageto send requests to the server. There is also
the HTTPS version, which is a secureand encrypted version for HTTP communications.

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 FTP(File Transfer Protocol): is used to load (upload) or retrieve (download) files between
the client and server communication, or between two computers onthe Internet. In other words,
this protocol is responsible for file transfer on the Internet.
 Internet Service Provider (ISP):Is an organization that provides individuals and other
companies’ access to the Internet and other related services such as e- mail.

Web Design: Client-Server Architecture

Client-Server Architecture

Computers on the Internet use client/server architecture. This means that the remote server
machine provides files and services to the user local client machine.

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 Web Server

A Web Server is a computer purposed to runs special serving software. That software"serves" HTML
pages and the files associated with those pages when requested by a client, usually a Web browser.
The computer is secured so that only authorized people can access it to make changes to the data,
so, If a person is on the same network as the Web Server, he or she may be able to save the data
directly onto theWeb Server computer (if authorized).

Server-side:

 JSP (Java Server Pages)

 ASP (Active Server Pages)

 ASP.NET (next generation of ASP)

 PHP

 Phython

Client

The Client (front end) or user side of the Web, it typically refers to the Web browserin the user's
machine. It may also refer to plug-ins and helper applications that enhance the browser to support
special services from the site. The term may imply the entire user machine or refer to a handheld
device that provides Web access.

Client-side:

 HTML / XHTML (Extensible Hyper Text Markup Language)

 CSS (Cascading Style Sheets )

 JavaScript / VBScript (client-side scripting).

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 Web Browsers

Generally, a web browser is a software application or program for retrieving, displaying,

and traversing information resources on the World Wide Web. An information resource is
identified by a Uniform Resource Identifier (URI) and maybe a web page, image, video, or other
piece.

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 Web Operations

The Web works on client- server approach. Following steps explains how the webworks:

1. User enters the URL (say, http://www.tutorialspoint.com) of the web pagein the address
bar of web browser.
2. Then browser requests the Domain Name Server for the IP address
corresponding to www.tutorialspoint.com.

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 3. After receiving IP address, browser sends the request for web page to the webserver using
HTTP protocol which specifies the way the browser and web server communicates.
4. Then web server receives request using HTTP protocol and checks its search for the
requested web page. If found it returns it back to the web browser andclose the HTTP
connection.
5. Now the web browser receives the web page, it interprets it and display the contents of web
page in web browser’s window.

Hyperlinks

Hyperlinks are the primary method used to navigate between pages and Web sites. Links can point
to other web pages, web sites, graphics, files, sounds, e-mail addresses, and other locations on the
same web page. When text is used as a hyperlink, it is usually underlined and appears as a different
color. There are four types of hyperlinks.
• Text hyperlink – Uses a word or phrase to take visitors to another page, file or document.
• Image hyperlink – Uses an image to take visitors to another page, file or document.

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• Bookmark hyperlink – Uses text or an image to take visitors to another part of aweb page.
• E-mail hyperlink – Allows visitors to send an e-mail message to the displayed e-mail address.

How Browsers Display Web pages

When a Web page is opened in a browser, the browser reads and interprets the HTML file
and formats the Web page for display. If there are references to external files, such as images or
multimedia, these files are downloaded from the server and displayed in the browser window. It is
important to note that HTML filesare text files that only contain references to the external files –
you do not “embed”these files into the Web page.

Types of Web Sites

There are many types of Web sites, each catering to a particular type of content oruse. Hence,
few illustrative but not exhaustive cases are given below:

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1) Blog (Web Log): site generally used to post online diaries which may include discussion
forums.

2) Social Networking Site: where users could communicate with one another and share media,
such as pictures, videos, music and blogs with other users. These may include games and Web
applications.

3) Wiki Site: which users collaboratively edit (such as Wikipedia and Wikihow).

4) Web Portal: that provides a starting point or a gateway to other resources on theInternet.

5) Search Engine Site: a site that provides general information and is intended as agateway or
lookup for other sites like Google, Yahoo, Bing search engines.

6) Education Site: where teachers, students, or administrators can post informationabout current
events at or involving their school.

Website Design Issues

There are many points one should keep in mind while designing a Web site. These points make
a site usable and easily accessible to the users, which arediscussed below:

1) Information Availability-- All the information that helps a visitor make informed decisions
should be in the Web site. The general benchmark of a goodWeb site is that it should be providing 80-
90 % of what a user/visitor is lookingfor.

2) Page layout: How the content is displayed on the page -- The page should be laid in such a
way people should be able to find relevant content quickly.

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Else they lose interest and leave the site. Page should be simple to enhance theusability of the page.

3) Colors -Standard colors should be used as colors can affect the usability ofthe site. For example,
the standard colors used for links (blue for links; violet for visited links; and red for active links)
should be maintained as one runs therisk of confusing the visitors.

4) Web Accessibility- Web accessibility means accessibility to all including people with
disabilities (like visual, audio, physical, speech) can interact or contribute to the Web. As more
and more accessible Web sites and software are made available, people with disabilities should be
able to use and contribute the Web more effectively.

5) User-friendly Site- web site should be creating based on what the audiencerequires.

6) Download Speed - The download speed cannot determine by a Web designer. Some
considerations are optimizing the graphics (images not larger than 10 kb), making smaller pages,
and avoiding nested tables.

COMPUTER NETWORK

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