Archive for January, 2009

Web Browser

Web Browser is an application software that helps the user to extract information in the form of text, images, videos, audios etc.from the webpage which in turn is located on a web site. generally a Web page has hyperlinks to other pages on the same website or at different websites. Web browsers

web-browser-and-web-server

allows the user to access the information by traversing these hyperlinks. Web browser also executes the HTML code that is why the appearance of a wepage on different web browser is different. Generally web browsers are used for world wide web access but they can also be used for content retrieval in file systems. A list of popular web browsers include Internet Explorer, Mozilla Fire Fox, Opera, safari, AOL Explorers The Hyper Text transfer Protocol acts as a medium between web browsers and web servers in access of a web page. This protocol provides a way to web browser due to which it can send the request to the server and also can retrieve the response from the web server. The HTTP 1.1 version is generally used which is supported by most of the browsers today except Internet Explorer. Internet Explorer supports this version of protocol but not fully. The web pages are located with the help of Uniform Resource Locator which is treated as an address by the web browser. The URL pattern for different protocols also differ. For example the URL of Hyper Text Transfer Protocol is http: for Gopher protocol it is gopher while for File Transfer protocol it is ftp:

Web servers

A Web server is a system program that accepts request from the client (web browser) and after its interpretation gives back the response Beside this a web server can also provide the following facilities

• Authentication: The web server checks the request before sending back the response.
• Content Compression : It can also cut off the size of the response content without altering the meaning.
• Virtual host: It can also link various web sites using only one IP address
• Support for file: IT provides support to large files.
• Bandwidth throttling: To lower down the response time of any request and to serve a number of clients at any instant of time.
• Web server also maps the path of the Uniform Resource Locator to:

a local file system if the request is static.

a program(Internal or External) if the request is dynamic.