The Technology

Web technology is divided roughly into client and server categories. The client category comprises the browsers and helper applications like mpeg or quicktime movie viewers, or audio players. I am not going to talk much about these except to say that the capabilities of the client software limit the types of applications that can be implemented using Web technology. The server category comprises the server daemon and the tools that are needed to format information so that it can be presented as HTML documents in response to requests.

Figure 1 shows the major pieces of Web technology. A browser connects to a server using standard TCP/IP networking protocol. It then makes requests for information from the server using the native Web protocol, HTTP (Hypertext Transport Protocol). The server responds to the requests with information formatted using HTML (Hypertext Markup Language) which tells the browser how to present the information. In order for the information to be available to be served, it must be put on the server machine in one of the several formats that the server software can access. The server software is usually called the httpd (or HTTP daemon).

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