| Chapter 1: | The World Wide Web: A General Introduction |
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Each of these technologies has its distinctive uses. Table 1.1 presents a brief explanation of each of the technologies.
Enabled by its core technologies, the Web has the following features (Abbate, 1999; Chatterjee, 1997; Mitra & Cohen, 1999):
Table 1.1. Core Web technologies.
| HTML | A shared data format for hypertext documents, a lan- guage derived from the Standard Generalized Markup language (SGML). It can not only specify the viewing format for various document features such as titles, headings, texts, or hypertext links, it is also used to create multimedia documents. Through the process of “format negotiation,” it can allow the Web to handle dif- ferent data formats. |
| URL | A standard address format that specifies the locations of documents on the Internet. It usually contains three pieces of information necessary to retrieve a docu ment: the application protocol to be used, the server and port to connect, and the file path to retrieve. The protocols it refers to include not only HTTP but also other applica- tions such as FTP or gopher. |
| HTTP | A hypertext transfer protocol used to retrieve Web documents or to guide the exchange of information between Web browsers and Web servers. It does not retain any information about a connection from request to request, and the connection between the browsers and server is broken after each request is made. |
Sources. Abbate (1999); Berners-Lee (1996); and Chatterjee (1997).