Slide 9 of 32

Connecting to the World Wide Web

Web clients (or browsers) may take many forms such as software running on a personal computer, a laptop computer, a television "set-top box", a cellular telephone or some other "information appliance."

In order to access the world wide web, web clients need access to the Internet. While TCP/IP is generally the protocol (or language) used by computers to communicate over the Internet, the web browser will use HTTP to communicate with web servers. In other words, both TCP/IP and HTTP are used to allow web clients and servers to exchange information with one another.

A web server is a repository of data which makes up the content of web pages. In some cases, web pages are stored on the web server computer as a single file. In other cases, the web pages are generated by an application program. Sometimes these application programs are referred to as CGI programs. The name comes from the name of the CGI (Common Gateway Interface) protocol which the web server uses to exchange information with the application program.