The Internet Basics

Introduction

The Internet is probably the most exciting, the most popular, most visible and definitely
the “coolest” information systems development of the decade.

What is the Internet?

The origins of the Internet can be found in the early sixties, when the U.S. Department of
Defense sponsored a project to develop a telecommunications network that would survive a
nuclear attack. It had to link together a diverse set of computers and work in a decentralized
manner so that, if any part of the network were not functioning, network traffic would
automatically be re-routed via other network nodes. This project quickly grew into a popular
academic network linking virtually all major research institutions and U.S. universities.

Electronic mail

Probably the most popular Internet service is electronic mail, more commonly known as email.
This consists of the sending of messages composed on the computer, via a network, directly to
the computer of the recipient who reads the message on his/her computer. Knowledge workers
with access to e-mail write five to ten times as many e-mail messages as hand-written notes.
The following are just some of the advantages of e-mail.

● Reliability: although there is no guarantee, you will normally receive quick feedback if
the address does not exist or there is a similar delivery problem.
● Efficiency: many short-cut tools exist to increase your efficiency when composing
messages. You can use your computer’s cut-and-paste function, you can have managed
address books and lists, when replying to another message you can automatically
incorporate any part of the message to which you are, etc. And it is just as easy to send a
message to one as to a whole list of addressees. (Admittedly, this results in a lot of abuse
and information overload on the recipient’s side.)
● Digital: e-mail is composed on a computer and remains in computer-readable format all
the way to its destination. Thus one can also easily incorporate other computer data
such as graphics or document files.
● Cheap: because the capacity of the Internet and disk storage is increasing all the time,
the cost of a sending and storing a one-page e-mail message is negligible.
 ● Speed: messages are generally delivered across the world in a matter of seconds.

The international standard for domain identification is ….

● The country code is the international two-letter code for the country (e.g., au for
Australia, za for South Africa, sa for Saudi-Arabia, uk for Great Britain, etc).
● The two most common types of organizations are co for a commercial organization and
ac for an academic institution . Less frequent are org for (not-for-profit) organizations,
mil for military, net for networks and gov for government agencies.
● Each country has a national Internet naming body that allows its organizations to chose
their own name, as long as no one has claimed the same name before. Examples of
South African domain names are anc.org.za, uct.ac.za, fnb.co.za.
● Large organizations often refine the domain further by adding the name of their LAN
servers, e.g mail.uct.ac.za.

The Web

The Internet service that has received the most attention from the public media is the
WorldWide Web or the Web for short (sometimes also called WWW or W3). The Web is a vast
collection of multimedia information located on Web servers attached to the Internet.

Its popularity is due to a number of reasons.

● Information links are transparent. Links to any other piece of information located
anywhere on the Internet can be inserted in a web document. A simple click of the
mouse takes the reader completely automatically from one Web server to another, quite
possibly in another country.
● Information can be presented in a hypertext link format whereby one can jump
immediately from one concept to a related concept or explanation. No need to read text
in the traditional top-to-bottom sequential way.
● It allows for multimedia information. A Web document can incorporate rich and
colourful graphics, animation, video clips, sound etc. Just think of the marketing
opportunities!
● The Web supports interactive applications. Web applications can request information
from visiting users and documents can include programming instructions. Users can
even download small programs (often written in Java) that could perform some
processing on the user’s computer or display special visual effects.
Other Internet services

A number of other services are available on the Internet. The Usenet consists of ongoing
discussion fora (or newsgroups) on an extremely wide variety of topics, from forensic
psychology to Douglas Adams, from Star Trek to cryptography. The discussion happens entirely
by means of e-mail and, when you subscribe to a given newsgroup, you can browse through the
contributions of the last few days and reply with your own contribution.

More specialized services exist, such as ftp (file transfer protocol) for the transfer of large
computer files, and telnet, the remote access of computers elsewhere, but they are used less
frequently. In any way, these services are now being performed transparently by most Web
browsers. Similarly, older services such as Gopher and Veronica have really been replaced
almost entirely by the Web.

Internet protocols and standards

Different computers and networks can communicate via the Internet because a number of basic
Internet communication standards have been defined. Any network connected to the Internet
will translate its own standards and protocols into those used on the Internet by means of a
bridge.

The most fundamental and “lowest level” protocol is the TCP/IP (Transmission Control
Protocol/Internet Protocol). This protocol is also the native protocol of computers using the
Unix operating system, which explains why Unix computers are so popular as Internet servers.

On top of TCP/IP are the “mid-level” protocols defined for the various Internet services. Perhaps
the best known of these is http (Hypertext Transmission Protocol), which specifies how the Web
information is made available and transmitted across the Internet. Other protocols and
standards are STMP and MIME (for e-mail) or ftp.

Features of Internet

Let us now discuss the features of Internet. The features are described below −

Accessibility

An Internet is a global service and accessible to all. Today, people located in a remote part of an
island or interior of Africa can also use Internet.
Easy to Use

The software, which is used to access the Internet (web browser), is designed very simple;
therefore, it can be easily learned and used. It is easy to develop.

Interaction with Other Media

Internet service has a high degree of interaction with other media. For example, News and
other magazine, publishing houses have extended their business with the help of Internet
services.

Low Cost

The development and maintenance cost of Internet service are comparatively low.

Extension of Existing IT Technology

This facilitates the sharing of IT technology by multiple users in organizations and even
facilitates other trading partners to use.

Flexibility of Communication

Communication through Internet is flexible enough. It facilitates communication through text,

voice, and video too. These services can be availed at both organizational and individual levels.

Security

Last but not the least, Internet facility has to a certain extent helped the security system both at
the individual and national level with components such as CCTV camera, etc.

Internet application

An Internet application does something for end users. It is generally not concerned with how
data is actually transmitted between the hosts. Here are some distributed applications that
require well-defined application level protocols:

● Sending and receiving email

● Searching and browsing information archives
● Copying files between computers
● Conducting financial transactions
 ● Navigating (in your car, smart scooter, smart bike, or other)
● Playing interactive games
● Video and music streaming
● Chat or voice communication (direct messaging, video conferencing)

In addition, there are a number of network services such as:

● Name servers
● Configuration servers
● Mail gateways, transfer agents, relays
● File and print servers

Internet services

To access/exchange a large amount of data such as software, audio clips, video clips, text files,
other documents, etc., we need internet services. You must use an Internet service in order to
connect to the Internet. Data can be sent from Internet servers to your machine via Internet
service. Some of the commonly used internet services are :

1. Communication Services: To exchange data/information among individuals or

organizations, we need communication services. Following are some of the common
communication services:
▪ List Server (LISTSERV): Delivers a group of email recipient’s content-specific
emails.
▪ E-Mail: Used to send electronic mail via the internet. It is a paperless method
for sending text, images, documents, videos, etc from one person to another
via the internet.
▪ User Network (USENET): It hosts newsgroups and message boards on certain
topics, and it is mostly run by volunteers.
▪ Telnet: It’s used to connect to a remote computer that’s connected to the
internet.

2. File Transfer: The exchange of data files across computer systems is referred to as file
transfer. Using the network or internet connection transferring or shifting a file from one
computer to another is known as file transfer. To share, transfer, or send a file or logical
data item across several users and/or machines, both locally and remotely, we use file
transfer. Data files include – documents, multimedia, pictures, text, and PDFs and they
can be shared by uploading or downloading them. To retrieve information from the
internet, there are various services available such as:
 ● Gopher: A file retrieval application based on hierarchical, distributed menus
that is simple to use.
● FTP (File Transfer Protocol): To share, transfer, or send a file or logical data item
across several users and/or machines, both locally and remotely.
● Archie: A file and directory information retrieval system that may be linked to
FTP

3. Web services: Web services are software that uses defined messaging protocols and is
made accessible for usage by a client or other web-based programs through an
application service provider’s web server. Web services allow information to be
exchanged across web-based applications. Using Utility Computing, web services can be
provided.
4. World Wide Web: The internet is a vast network of interconnected computers. Using
this network, you can connect to the World Wide Web (abbreviated as ‘www’ or ‘web’)
is a collection of webpages. The web browser lets you access the web via the internet.
5. Time Services: Using facilities included in the operating system, you may set your
computer clock via the Internet. Some services are :

● Network Time Protocol (NTP): It is a widely used internet time service that
allows you to accurately synchronize and adjust your computer clock.
● The Simple Network Time Protocol (SNTP): It is a time-keeping protocol that is
used to synchronize network hardware. When a full implementation of NTP is
not required, then this simplified form of NTP is typically utilized.

6. E-commerce: Electronic commerce, also known as e-commerce or e-Commerce, is a

business concept that allows businesses and individuals to buy and sell goods through
the internet. Example: Amazon, Flipkart, etc. websites/apps.

LOGICAL AND PHYSICAL ADDRESSES:

MAC Addresses (Physical Address):

● It is also known as the ‘Link address‘ . It is basically the address of any particular node
that has been described by the LAN or WAN (already covered in the previous post).
● It is further included inside the frame which is utilized by the DLL (data link layer) of OSI
model. It is the bottom-most layer (bottom-most address in OSI model) address.
 ● The packets through the source to destination hosts move across physical networks. The
internet protocol address details is not useful however the host and routers are
acknowledged by their MAC addresses .
● A MAC address is basically a local address. It will be unique locally but it is not unique
universally. The format and size of this kind of address will further change depending on
the network.
● Most importantly we should be able to map an IP address into a corresponding MAC
address.
● The size and format of any physical address vary depending on the nature of network.

2. Logical Address(IP Addresses):

● Logical address is required to facilitate universal communication in which different types

of the physical networks can be involved. In a universal addressing system, every single
host will be recognized individually, regardless of any fundamental physical network.
● The logical address is also called the IP (Internet Protocol) address.
● The internet consists of many physical networks interconnected via devices like routers.
● Internet is a packed switched networked that means the data from the source computer
is sent in the form of small packets carrying the destination address upon them.
● A packet starts from the source host,passes through many physical networks, and finally
reaches the destination host.When the frame reaches the destination, the packet is then
decapsulated.
● The destination logical address further matches the logical address of a particular
computer. The data are then finally decapsulated from the packet and then delivered
(forwarded) to the upper layer.
● The message frame is initially received by every unit on the LAN network , but is then
declined by all apart from the necessarily required router, which ultimately realizes that
the location destination address in the frame fits with its own target physical address.
The router then finally decapsulates the data packet in order to retrieve the destination
logical address .
● At the network level , the hosts and routers are further recognised by their IP
Addresses.Note that although the physical addresses will change itself from the hop to
hop movement (each jump transition) , the logical addresses will remain the same from
the source to destination .
● An IP address is an internetwork address .It is a universally unique address.
● Every protocol involved in internetwork requires IP address.The logical address used on
the internet is currently a 32-bit address . The same IP address can be used by more
than one computer on the internet.
INTERNET SERVICE PROVIDERS:

An Internet service provider (ISP) is an organization that provides services for accessing, using,
or participating in the Internet. Internet service providers can be organized in various forms,
such as commercial, community-owned, non-profit, or otherwise privately owned.

Internet services typically provided by ISPs can include Internet access, Internet transit, domain
name registration, web hosting, Usenet service, and colocation.

An ISP typically serves as the access point or the gateway that provides a user access to
everything available on the Internet.

DOMAIN NAME SYSTEM:

● People have difficulty dealing with and remembering numbers, machine on the internet
also have textual names.

● These names begin with the name of the host machine, followed by progressively larger
enclosing collection of machine called domains.

● There may be two, three or more domain names.

● The first domain name, which appears immediately to the right of the host name, is the
domain of which the host is a part.

● Second domain name gives the domain of which the first domain is a part organization
in which the host resides, which is largest domain in the sites name.

● Example : Domain Name

● .com – Commercial Organization , .org – Nonprofit Organization , .net- Networking

organization etc

● http://msoft.com/index.html

● The first part of the address indicates the protocol to be used.

● Second part specifies the IP address or domain name where the resource is located.

● The above URL specifies a web page to be fetched using the HTTP protocol.
WEB BASICS: INTRODUCTION TO WEB:

Web consists of billions of clients and server connected through wires and wireless networks.
The web clients make requests to web server. The web server receives the request, finds the
resources and return the response to the client. When a server answers a request, it usually
sends some type of content to the client. The client uses web browser to send request to the
server. The server often sends response to the browser with a set of instructions written in
HTML(HyperText Markup Language). All browsers know how to display HTML page to the client.

WEB BROWSERS:
 • When two computers communicate over some network, in many cases one acts as a
client and other as a server.

• The client initiates the communication, which is often a request for information stored
on the server, which sends that information back to the client.

• The web as well as many other systems, operates in this client/server configuration.

• Documents provided by sever on the web are requested by browsers which are
programs running on client machine. They are called browsers.

• Because they allow the users to browse the resource available on server.

• The first browsers were text based they were not capable of displaying any sort of
graphic information nor did they have a graphical user interface.

• By late 1993, version of Mosaic for Apple Macintosh and Microsoft Window system had
been released, to support graphical user interface.

• A browser is a client on the web because it initiates the communication with a server
which waits for a request from a client before doing anything.

• In the simplest case, a browser requests a static document from a server. The server
locates the document and sends it to the browser, which displays it for the user.

HTTP (Hypertext Transfer Protocol) / HTTPS:

● HTTP is a protocol that clients and servers use on the web to communicate.
● It is similar to other internet protocols such as SMTP(Simple Mail Transfer Protocol) and
FTP(File Transfer Protocol) but there is one fundamental difference.
● HTTP is a stateless protocol i.e HTTP supports only one request per connection. This
means that with HTTP the clients connect to the server to send one request and then
disconnects. This mechanism allows more users to connect to a given server over a
period of time.
● The client sends an HTTP request and the server answers with an HTML page to the
client, using HTTP.
HTTP Methods

HTTP request can be made using a variety of methods, but the ones you will use most often are
Get and Post. The method name tells the server the kind of request that is being made, and
how the rest of the message will be formatted.

GET Request POST Request

Data is sent in header to the server Data is sent in the request body
Get request can send only limited amount of
Large amount of data can be sent.
data
Get request is not secured because data is Post request is secured because data is not
exposed in URL exposed in URL.
Get request can be bookmarked and is more
Post request cannot be bookmarked.
efficient.

UNIFORM RESOURCE LOCATOR (URL):

• URL is used to identify documents on the internet. There are many different kinds of
resources , identified by different forms of URL.

URL FORMAT:

• All URLs have the same general format Scheme : Object –Address
• The scheme is often a communication protocol. Common scheme include http, ftp,
gopher, telnet, file, mail-to and news.

• Different scheme use objects address that have different forms. Our main interest is in
the HTTP protocol , which supports the web.

• It is used to request and send extensible Hypertext Markup Language(XHTML)

documents.

• In the case of http , the form of the object address of a URL is as follows.

Fully-qualified-domain-name/path-to-document

• URL can never have embedded space also; there is a collection of special characters that
cannot appear in a URL, including semicolons, colons and ampersands.

• To include a space or one of the disallowed special characters in a URL, the character
must be coded as a percent sign followed by the two digit hexadecimal ASCII code for
the character.

• For example, if San José is a domain name, it must be typed as san%20jose (20 is the
hexadecimal ASCII code for a space).

• All of the details of URL can be found at

http://www.w3.org/addressing/URL/URI_overview.html

URL PATH:

• The path to the document for the HTTP protocol is similar to path to a file or directory in
the file system of an operating system.

• A sequence of directory names and s filename, all separated by whatever separator

character the operating system uses.

• For UNIX server, the path is specified with forward slashes for windows servers, it is
specified with backward slashes.

• The path in a URL can differ from a path to a file because a URL need not include all
directories on the path.
 • In most cases, the path to the document is relative to some base path that is specified in
the configuration files of the server; such paths are called partial paths.

http://www.xyz.com/storefront.html

• If specified document is a directory rather than a single document , the directory name
is followed immediately by a slash , as in the following

http://www.xyz.com/department/

• Sometimes a directory is specified (with the trailing slash) but its name is not given ,

http://www.xyz.com/

• The server then search at the top level of directory in which servable it recognize as a
home page.

HTML5

HTML stands for Hyper Text Markup Language. It is used to design web pages using markup
language. HTML is the combination of Hypertext and Markup language. Hypertext defines the
link between the web pages. Markup language is used to define the text document within tag
which defines the structure of web pages. HTML 5 is the fifth and current version of HTML. It
has improved the markup available for documents and has introduced application programming
interfaces(API) and Document Object Model(DOM).

Features:

● It has introduced new multimedia features which supports audio and video controls by
using <audio> and <video> tags.
● There are new graphics elements including vector graphics and tags.
● Enrich semantic content by including <header> <footer>, <article>, <section> and
<figure> are added.
● Drag and Drop- The user can grab an object and drag it further dropping it on a new
location.
● Geo-location services- It helps to locate the geographical location of a client.
● Web storage facility which provides web application methods to store data on web
browser.
● Uses SQL database to store data offline.
 ● Allows to draw various shapes like triangle, rectangle, circle, etc.
● Capable of handling incorrect syntax.
● Easy DOCTYPE declaration i.e. <!doctype html>
● Easy character encoding i.e. <meta charset=”UTF-8″>

CSS:

Cascading Style Sheets, fondly referred to as CSS, is a simply designed language intended to
simplify the process of making web pages presentable. CSS allows you to apply styles to web
pages. More importantly, CSS enables you to do this independent of the HTML that makes up
each web page. CSS is easy to learn and understand, but it provides powerful control over the
presentation of an HTML document.

WHY CSS?

● CSS saves time: You can write CSS once and reuse the same sheet in multiple HTML
pages.
● Easy Maintenance: To make a global change simply change the style, and all elements in
all the webpages will be updated automatically.
● Search Engines: CSS is considered a clean coding technique, which means search
engines won’t have to struggle to “read” its content.
● Superior styles to HTML: CSS has a much wider array of attributes than HTML, so you
can give a far better look to your HTML page in comparison to HTML attributes.
● Offline Browsing: CSS can store web applications locally with the help of an offline
cache. Using this we can view offline websites.

CSS Syntax:
A CSS comprises style rules that are interpreted by the browser and then applied to the
corresponding elements in your document.
A style rule set consists of a selector and declaration block.

Selector -- h1
Declaration -- {color:blue;font size:12px;}

● The selector points to the HTML element you want to style.

● The declaration block contains one or more declarations separated by semicolons.
● Each declaration includes a CSS property name and a value, separated by a colon.
For Example:
–; color is property and blue is value.
–; font-size is property and 12px is value.
● A CSS declaration always ends with a semicolon, and declaration blocks are surrounded
by curly braces.
EXAMPLE:

p{
color: blue;
text-align: center;
}