WWW standards

WWW standards

The World Wide Web is defined by a handful of protocol specifications. Software developers use those specifications to implement the web browser and web server programs. The interaction between browser and server is by Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP). Web browsers send messages conforming to this protocol to web server, this in turn return requested information.

The Uniform Resource Locator (URL) protocol specifies how individual resources are to be identified within the WWW. Web browsers use these URLs in HTTP requests to remote servers. They identify to the server exactly what resource is being requested.

Hypertext markup language (HTML) tags which define the different functional pieces of each document. HTML documents consist of plain text (ASCII) files and may point to graphics files, other types of multimedia files like audio or video files stored in standard formats or other network resources (URLs).

The Common Gateway Interface (CGI) specifies mechanisms for passing information from the person browsing your web server to other resources available through that server, in particular by collecting information from remote user in web forms and then passing that information along to the other resource. CGI provides the link between the web server and the rest of the commercial process. The security protocols relevant to WWW include Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) and Secure Hypertext Transfer Protocol(S-HTTP). They add security to existing protocols between the browsers and servers that support them.

Browsers and Servers-

Web browsers or clients must be able to send HTTP requests and receive HTTP replies from servers. Browser functions can also be integrated into more complete network or communications packages or even into operating systems like IBM’s OS/2 Warp.
Web servers are set up on higher performance systems with higher performance connections to the internet.