Learning objectives

When you have completed this session, you should be able to

• define term "html, url, http",
• define term "world wide web".

HTML, URL, HTTP

HTML, which stands for HyperText Markup Language, is the predominant markup language for web pages. It provides a means to create structured documents by denoting structural semantics for text such as headings, paragraphs, lists, links, quotes and other items. It allows images and objects to be embedded and can be used to create interactive forms. It is written in the form of HTML elements consisting of "tags" surrounded by angle brackets within the web page content. It can embed scripts in languages such as JavaScript which affect the behavior of HTML webpages. HTML can also be used to include Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) to define the appearance and layout of text and other material. The W3C, maintainer of both HTML and CSS standards, encourages the use of CSS over explicit presentational markup.

In computing, a Uniform Resource Locator (URL) is a Uniform Resource Identifier (URI) that specifies where an identified resource is available and the mechanism for retrieving it. In popular usage and in many technical documents and verbal discussions it is often incorrectly used as a synonym for URI,[1]. The best-known example of a URL is the "address" of a web page on the World Wide Web, e.g. http://www.tenegen.eu

The Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP) is an Application Layer protocol for distributed, collaborative, hypermedia information systems.

HTTP is a request-response protocol standard for client-server computing. In HTTP, a web browser, for example, acts as a client, while an application running on a computer hosting the web site acts as a server. The client submits HTTP requests to the responding server by sending messages to it. The server, which stores content (or resources) such as HTML files and images, or generates such content on the fly, sends messages back to the client in response. These returned messages may contain the content requested by the client or may contain other kinds of response indications. A client is also referred to as a user agent (or 'UA' for short). A web crawler (or 'spider') is another example of a common type of client or user agent.

In between the client and server there may be several intermediaries, such as proxies, web caches or gateways. In such a case, the client communicates with the server indirectly, and only converses directly with the first intermediary in the chain. A server may be called the origin server to reflect the fact that this is where content ultimately originates from.

World Wide Web

The World Wide Web, abbreviated as WWW and commonly known as the Web, is a system of interlinked hypertext documents accessed via the Internet. With a web browser, one can view web pages that may contain text, images, videos, and other multimedia and navigate between them by using hyperlinks. Using concepts from earlier hypertext systems, British engineer and computer scientist Sir Tim Berners-Lee, now the Director of the World Wide Web Consortium, wrote a proposal in March 1989 for what would eventually become the World Wide Web. He was later joined by Belgian computer scientist Robert Cailliau while both were working at CERN in Geneva, Switzerland. In 1990, they proposed using "HyperText [...] to link and access information of various kinds as a web of nodes in which the user can browse at will", and released that web in December.

"The World-Wide Web (W3) was developed to be a pool of human knowledge, which would allow collaborators in remote sites to share their ideas and all aspects of a common project." If two projects are independently created, rather than have a central figure make the changes, the two bodies of information could form into one cohesive piece of work.

Reference:

Wikipedia