---

How it All Works

---

First, what's the difference between the Internet and the World Wide Web?

• The Internet: is a bunch of computers that talk by means of different protocols: telnet (how to do things on other computers), ftp (how to get files from other computers), http (HyperText Transfer Protocol: how to get WWW files) etc..

• The World Wide Web: is those computers on the Internet that are connected to allow client computer running browser software to get pages from other computers running server software. A page that is viewed on a browser is actually a file that is resident on a server which could be anywhere in the world.

---

Important Point:

Communication on the Web is between computers running browser software (clients) and those running server sofware (servers). Web pages are located on servers.

---

How this works: My home page is a file called index.html which is on my computer, called brillig.nebrwesleyan.edu. It in a directory called ~glarose.

Figure 1: browser opening page

Thus, if by clicking on this link or using the "Open Location" option on the browser (figure 1) we go to my home page, the browser "calls up" my computer (brillig) and asks for my home page. This transfer is actually a sequence of calls to brillig and answers sent by the server software that I have running on there, which answers are the data contained in the home page

The address of the page is its URL--Uniform Resource Locator--which tells what the file is, what server it is on, where on the server it is, and how to get it. The URL for my home page is

http://brillig.nebrwesleyan.edu/~glarose/index.html, which gives the protocol (http), computer (brillig.nebrwesleyan.edu), and location (~glarose/) of the file (index.html) to get. All addresses are given relative to the current location. Thus in my home page I can refer to a page called dviview.html to mean http://brillig.nebrwesleyan.edu/~glarose/dviview.html, or images/check.gif to mean http://brillig.nebrwesleyan.edu/~glarose/images/check.gif

---

Important Point:

Addresses of documents on the WWW have the form protocol://computer.name/directory/filename e.g., http://brillig.nebrwesleyan.edu/~glarose/index.html

Important Point:

Addresses of documents on the WWW are given relative to the document they are in.

---

It is also possible to specify a location in a document with the URL: the URL

http://brillig.nebrwesleyan.edu/~glarose/index.html#summary tells the browser to go not only to the file index.html but specifically to the location named summary in that file.

---

[title]	[objectives]	[www uses]	[the works]	[basic html]
[adv html]	[editors]	[resources]		[feedback]

---

last modified (( Jun 17 07:46:54 1997 ))
HTML/WWW Wkshop: How the WWW Works
©1997 Gavin LaRose
Comments to: glarose@NebrWesleyan.edu