Web Programming
Unit:1 Introduction to Internet
Introduction to Internet:
Internet is a global communication system that links together thousands of
individual networks. It allows exchange of information between two or more
computers on a network. Thus internet helps in transfer of messages through
mail, chat, video & audio conference, etc. It has become mandatory for day-to-
day activities: bills payment, online shopping and surfing, tutoring, working,
communicating with peers, etc. Internet was evolved in 1969, under the project
called ARPANET (Advanced Research Projects Agency Network) to connect
computers at different universities and U.S. defence. Soon after the people from
different backgrounds such as engineers, scientists, students and researchers
started using the network for exchanging information and messages. In 1990s
the internet working of ARPANET, NSF net and other private networks resulted
into Internet. Therefore, Internet is a global network of computer networks . It
comprises of millions of computing devices that carry and transfer volumes of
information from one device to the other. Desktop computers, mainframes, GPS
units, cell phones, car alarms, video game consoles, are connected to the Net.
World Wide Web:
The World Wide Web (abbreviated WWW or the Web) is an information
space where documents and other web resources are identified by Uniform
Resource Locators (URLs), interlinked by hypertext links, and can be accessed
via the Internet. English scientist Tim Berners-Lee invented the World Wide
Web in 1989. He wrote the first web browser computer program in 1990 while
employed at CERN in Switzerland. The Web browser was released outside
CERN in 1991, first to other research institutions starting in January 1991 and
to the general public on the Internet in August 1991. The World Wide Web has
been central to the development of the Information Age and is the primary tool
billions of people use to interact on the Internet. Web pages are primarily text
documents formatted and annotated with Hypertext Mark-up Language
(HTML). In addition to formatted text, web pages may contain images, video,
audio, and software components that are rendered in the user's web browser as
coherent pages of multimedia content. Embedded hyperlinks permit users to
navigate between web pages. Multiple web pages with a common theme, a
common domain name, or both, make up a website. Website content can largely
be provided by the publisher, or interactively where users contribute content or
the content depends upon the users or their actions. Websites may be mostly
informative, primarily for entertainment, or largely for commercial,
governmental, or non-governmental organizational purposes.
WWW is another example of client/server computing. Each time a link is
followed, the client is requesting a document (or graphic or sound file) from a
server (also called a Web server) that's part of the World Wide Web that
"serves" up the document. The server uses a protocol called HTTP or Hyper
Text Transport Protocol. The standard for creating hypertext documents for the
WWW is Hyper Text Mark-up Language or HTML. HTML essentially codes
plain text documents so they can be viewed on the Web.
