Background Knowledge
You have probably been using the internet for a number of years but have no idea how it works, in order to get a general idea read the following.
How it works
Each webpage is its own file, a web client (user) clicks a link on a web page to view another web page ,the clients computer asks the web server to send the file (webpage) to the clients computer, the web server then sends the file to the client.
These files (webpages) are text files that consist of HTML tags (layout instructions), and text (content/information) placed between the tags. The clients browser looks at the HTML tags in the file(webpage) and translates those tags to show whatever it is the client is looking at. Tags are instructions that tell the browser what to show on a Web page and where to show it. All tags start with a < (left bracket) and end with a > (right¬bracket).
How does the WWW work?
- Web information is stored in documents called Web pages.
- Web pages are files stored on computers called Web servers.
- Computers reading the Web pages are called Web clients.
- Web clients view the pages with a program called a Web browser.
- Popular browsers are Internet Explorer, Netscape Navigator and Opera.
How does the browser fetch and display the pages?
- A browser fetches a Web page from a server by a request.
- A request is a standard HTTP request containing a URL.
- A URL looks like this: http://www.someone.com/page.htm.
- All Web pages contain instructions for display.
- The browser displays the page by reading these instructions.
What is HTML?
- The most common display instructions are called HTML tags.
- HTML stands for Hyper Text Markup Language.
- An HTML file is a text file containing small markup tags.
- HTML tags look like this <p >This is a Paragraph </p >.
- The markup tags tell the Web browser how to display the page.