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The World Wide Web (WWW) is a vast collection of electronic documents that are located on many different Web servers and contain text and images that can be accessed by simply clicking links within a browser’s Web page. Using a Web browser, you can download and view Web pages on a personal computer.
Of all the Internet services, the World Wide Web is probably the one that has had the most profound impact on business. Internet retail sales and service support have exploded with use of personal computers and Web browsers. Virtually any and every imaginable product and service is now sold on the Web. In a single day, you can purchase clothing and groceries, buy an airline ticket, select and purchase an automobile, plan a funeral, submit an auction bid on a toy you had as a child, find a new job, rent a videotape, and order pizza for dinner – all online. To do this, all you need is a personal computer with a connection to the Internet and a Web browser. The Web pages you download can consists of text, graphics, links to other Web pages, sometimes music and video, and even executable programs.
Web pages are created using HTML, which can be generated manually with a text-based editor such as Notepad, or through using a Web page authoring tool. A Web page authoring tool is similar to a word processor, except that instead of creating text documents, you create HTML-based Web pages. The Web page authoring tool has a graphical user interface that allows you to enter text and insert graphics and other Web page elements and also arrange about using a markup language to create a Web page.
One you’ve created your Web page, you store it on a computer that contains Web server software and has a connection to the Internet. The Web serer software accepts Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP) request from Web browsers connected to the Internet, retrieves a requested Web page from storage, and returns that Web page to the requesting computer via the Internet. Te Hypertext Transfer Protocol or HTTP, is and application layer protocol. When a user sitting at a workstation running a browser clicks a ling on a Web page, the browser software sees this click and creates an application layer HTTP command to retrieve a Web page. This HTTP command passes through the transport layer, network layer, and network access layer before it is placed on the network medium. When the Web page request is received at the Web site serer, the Web page is retrieved and returned across the Internet to the user’s browser, where it is displayed on the monitor.
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