Web Technology and Programming I

Diploma of Computer Engineering (I/II)

 1. Introduction: Internet and Web
1.1. History of Internet and web
Internet is a large network that connects computer systems all over the world. In
short form internet simply called net. The Web is the common name for the World
Wide Web, a subset of the Internet consisting of the pages that can be accessed by a
Web browser. The Web is just one of the ways that information is shared over the
Internet; others include email, instant messaging and File Transfer Protocol (FTP).

 Late 1960s US Department of Defense founded ARPAnet (Advanced Research Project

Agency Network). ARPANET used packet switch for communication.
 In 1969 ARPAnet delivered its first message: a node to node communication from one
computer to another.
 In 1970s first email invented and TCP/IP developed by Robert Kahn and Vinton
Cerf
 In 1983 ARPAnet adopted TCP/IP Technology and domain name system.
 In 1990s www is established by Tim Berners Lee, in 1992 first search engine
Aliweb is developed. in 1994 HTTPS, Amazon and yahoo was developed, in
1996 Hotmail was developed, in 1998 google was developed and Wi-Fi
technology was invented in 1999.
 In 2003 skype was developed, in 2004 Facebook, in 2005 YouTube was developed, in
2006 Twitter was developed, in 2016 TikTok was developed.

1.2. Introduction to WWW

WWW stands for World Wide Web. A technical definition of the World Wide Web is:
all the resources and users on the Internet that are using the Hypertext Transfer Protocol
(HTTP). The World Wide Web is the universe of network-accessible information, an
embodiment of human knowledge. In simple terms, The World Wide Web is a way of
exchanging information between computers on the Internet, tying them together into a
vast collection of interactive multimedia resources.
The Internet and the World Wide Web are not same thing. The internet provides access
to the world wide web.
1.3. Component of WWW

a) Web Page
A Web page is a representation of a document that is actually located at a remote site.
The information on a Web page is displayed online with the help of a Web browser
such as Internet Explorer, Mozilla Firefox or Google Chrome.
The data found in a Web page is usually in HTML or XHTML format. The Web pages
usually also contain other resources such as style sheets, scripts and images for
presentation. Users may be able to navigate to other pages through hypertext links .
A web page is often used to provide information to viewers, including pictures or
videos to help illustrate important topics. A web page may also be used as a method to
sell products or services to viewers.

b) Website
A website is collection of publicly accessible, interlinked Web pages that share a single
domain name. Websites can be created and maintained by an individual, group,
business or organization to serve a variety of purposes.
Together, all publicly accessible websites constitute the World Wide Web. A website
consists of several webpages. A website is also known as a ‘web presence’ or simply
‘site’ .
Websites were categorized by their top level domain. e.g.
 Government Agency Website (.gov)
 Educational institution’s website (.edu)
 Commercial Website (.com)
 Non-Profit Organization’s website (.org)
 Information sites (.info)
Types of website
 Blog
 Corporate
 Ecommerce
 News or Magazine
 Educational
 Radio or TV streaming
c) Homepage

A homepage is the main web page of a website. The term also refers to one or more
pages always shown in a web browser when the application starts up. In this case, it is
also known as the start page.

Home pages are located in the root directory of the website. Many home pages’ act as
a virtual directory for a site — they provide top-level menus where visitors can go
deeper into various areas of the site. For instance, a typical website has a homepage
with menu items like “about,” “contact,” “products,” “services,” “press” or “news.”

d) Protocols

It is a digital language through which we communicate with others on

the Internet. Protocol meaning is that it a set of mutually accepted and implemented
rules at both ends of the communications channel for the proper exchange
of information. By adopting these rules, two devices can communicate with each other
and can interchange information. We can’t even think of using the Internet without
Protocols. Examples of Protocols

 Transmission Control Protocol (TCP)

 Internet Protocol (IP)
 User Datagram Protocol (UDP)
 Post office Protocol (POP)
 Simple Mail Transport Protocol (SMTP)
 File Transfer Protocol (FTP)
 Hyper Text Transfer Protocol (HTTP)
 Hyper Text Transfer Protocol Secure (HTTPS)
 Telnet
 Gopher

e) Web Servers

The term web server can refer to hardware or software, or both of them working together.
A web server is a computer that runs websites. It's a computer program that distributes
web pages as they are requisitioned. The basic objective of the web server is to store,
process and deliver web pages to the users. This intercommunication is done using
Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP).
 The main job of a web server is to display the website content. If a web server is not
exposed to the public and is used internally, then it is called Intranet Server.
Apache and IIS (Internet Information System) are mostly used web server software.

1.4. Web Browsers

A browser is an application program that provides a way to look at and interact with all
the information on the World Wide Web. This includes Web pages, videos and images.
Web browsers are used primarily for displaying and accessing websites on the internet,
as well as other content created using languages such as Hypertext Markup Language
(HTML) and Extensible Markup Language (XML).
Browsers translate web pages and websites delivered using Hypertext Transfer Protocol
(HTTP) into human-readable content. They also have the ability to display other protocols
and prefixes, such as secure HTTP (HTTPS), File Transfer Protocol (FTP), email
handling (mailto:), and files (file:).
Google chrome, Opera Mini, Apple Safari, Microsoft Edge, Mozilla Firefox are widely
used web browsers.

1.5. Search Engines

A search engine is a web based tool or software system that allows Internet users to search
for content via the World Wide Web (WWW).
 A user enters keywords or key phrases into a search engine and receives a list of Web
content results in the form of websites, images, videos or other online data that
semantically match with the search query.
The list of content returned via a search engine to a user is known as a search engine
results page (SERP).
A search engine performs a number of steps to do its job. First a spider/web crawler trawls
the web for content that is added to the search engine's index. These small bots can scan
all sections and subpages of a website, including content such as video and images.

Hyperlinks are parsed to find internal pages or new sources to crawl when they point to
external websites. To help bots do their crawling work in a more efficient way, larger
websites usually submit a special XML sitemap to the search engine that acts as a
roadmap of the site itself.

Once all data has been fetched by the bots, the crawler adds it to a massive online library
of all discovered URLs. This constant and recursive process is known as indexing, and is
necessary for a website to be displayed in the SERP. Then, when a user queries a search
engine, relevant results are returned based on the search engine's algorithm.

The higher a website is ranked in the SERP, the more relevant it should be to the
searcher’s query. Since most users only browse the top results, it is particularly important
for a website to rank high enough for certain queries to ensure its success in terms of
traffic.

A whole science developed in the last few decades to make sure that a website, or at least
some of its pages, “scale” the ranking to reach the first positions. This discipline is known
as Search Engine Optimization (SEO).

Aliweb was the first search engine. Google, Yahoo, Bing and Baidu are widely used
search engines.

1.6. Internet Protocol and applications

Internet Protocol (IP) is the principal set (or communications protocol) of digital message
formats and rules for exchanging messages between computers across a single network
or a series of interconnected networks, using the Internet Protocol Suite (often referred to
as TCP/IP). Messages are exchanged as datagrams, also known as data packets or just
packets.
The main purpose and task of IP is the delivery of datagrams from the source host (source
computer) to the destination host (receiving computer) based on their addresses. To
achieve this, IP includes methods and structures for putting tags (address information,
which is part of metadata) within datagrams.

Internet Protocols applicable to

 Identifying errors
 Compressing the data
 Deciding how the data is to be sent
 Addressing the data
 Deciding how to announce sent and received data