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The Web - Clients and Servers

Diagram showing the relationship of client/server. Two people at a laptop requesting a page to the web server and the web server responding with a copy of the web page.

The Web consists of clients (browsers) and servers.

  1. As you type in a URL or web page address, a request is sent out across the Internet to a specific server.
  2. The server acts like a copy machine, making a copy of the requested files and sending them back to your client computer where they are displayed.
  3. The majority of the files consists of text which can be read by any computer. These files contain special markup codes which are used to determine the purpose of different sections of the page.
  4. This markup language is called XHTML (eXtensible Hypertext Markup Language). You can view the XHTML of any web page by selecting File/View Source

The browser is one of the key elements in making the Web work.

It translates the XHTML codes into what you see on the computer screen. It is simply a computer program that understands each of the XHTML elements and knows how to display them.

Once a file is updated on the server the changes are immediately available to any browser. The printing process of write/design/layout/print/distribute is greatly shortened and distribution time is immediate.