Small Business + The Internet = Getting Started

How Does The World Wide Web Works?
The World Wide Web refers to a particular method of transferring files among computers connected to the internet. The web’s most distinguishing feature is its ability to handle pictures with ease. Before discussing the file transfer method, we need to define a few terms.

html Files: Each page on the web is actually a program (or series of instructions) written in hypertext markup language (html). The program is saved as an html file and stored on a special computer known as a server. HTML files are read and interpreted by browsers, such as Netscape or Internet Explorer. To see the underlying html file for any web page, go to the View menu of your browser. Under that menu select “View Source” or a similar command depending on your browser.

Browser: A browser is a program that resides and runs on your PC or Mac. The two most frequently encountered browsers are Netscape and MS Internet Explorer. Your browser takes an html file, reads it, and follows its instructions to create the image of a web page on your computer screen.

Web Server: A Web server is a piece of computer software that can respond to a browser’s request for a page, and deliver the page to the Web browser through the Internet. You can think of a Web server as an apartment complex, with each apartment housing someone’s Web page. In order to store your page in the complex, you need to pay rent on the space. Pages that live in this complex can be displayed to and viewed by anyone all over the world. Your landlord is called your host, and your rent is usually called your hosting charge. Every day, there are millions of Web servers delivering pages to the browsers of tens of millions of people through the network we call the Internet. Read How Web Servers Work for details on this process.

Internet: The internet is an intricately interconnected group of servers.

URL (Universal Resource Locator): This is the address for a web page. It will begin with “http://” which stands for hypertext transfer protocol, which simply identifies the file transfer method being used. The next part of the address will have information about the server, account and directory where the web page is stored (“http://mrjacobs.com/logos.html”). Last is the file name (logos.html).

Web Page: A web page is a single html file that has been placed on a server to make it accessible to the internet.

Web Site: Any related collection of web pages is a web site.

Now, let’s follow what happens when you visit a web site. First, you give your browser a URL. In other words, you tell Netscape that you want to see a particular file that is stored on some remote server (perhaps in Argentina). Netscape then instructs your PC to contact your local internet server, which in turn contacts the remote server via the internet. Once contact has been made, gator1 asks the remote server to send it a copy of the specified html file. When gator1 receives the file, it then passes the file on to your PC. At this point, your browser reads the instructions and creates an image on your screen.