Web technology notes

What is World Wide Web?

World Wide Web, which is also known as a Web, is a collection of websites or web
pages stored in web servers and connected to local computers through the internet.
These websites contain text pages, digital images, audios, videos, etc. Users can access
the content of these sites from any part of the world over the internet using their
devices such as computers, laptops, cell phones, etc. The WWW, along with internet,
enables the retrieval and display of text and media to your device.

How the World Wide Web Works?

Now, we have understood that WWW is a collection of websites connected to the
internet so that people can search and share information. Now, let us understand how it
works!
The Web works as per the internet's basic client-server format as shown in the following
image. The servers store and transfer web pages or information to user's computers on
the network when requested by the users. A web server is a software program which
serves the web pages requested by web users using a browser. The computer of a user
who requests documents from a server is known as a client. Browser, which is installed
on the user' computer, allows users to view the retrieved documents.
All the websites are stored in web servers. Just as someone lives on rent in a house, a
website occupies a space in a server and remains stored in it. The server hosts the
website whenever a user requests its WebPages, and the website owner has to pay the
hosting price for the same.

The moment you open the browser and type a URL in the address bar or search
something on Google, the WWW starts working. There are three main technologies
involved in transferring information (web pages) from servers to clients (computers of
users). These technologies include Hypertext Markup Language (HTML), Hypertext
Transfer Protocol (HTTP) and Web browsers.

Difference between World Wide Web and Internet:

Some people use the terms 'internet' and 'World Wide Web' interchangeably. They think
they are the same thing, but it is not so. Internet is entirely different from WWW. It is a
worldwide network of devices like computers, laptops, tablets, etc. It enables users to
send emails to other users and chat with them online. For example, when you send an
email or chatting with someone online, you are using the internet.
But, when you have opened a website like google.com for information, you are using
the World Wide Web; a network of servers over the internet. You request a webpage
from your computer using a browser, and the server renders that page to your browser.
Your computer is called a client who runs a program (web browser), and asks the other
computer (server) for the information it needs.

What is protocol ?

Internet Protocols are a set of rules that governs the communication and
exchange of data over the internet. Both the sender and receiver should follow
the same protocols in order to communicate the data. In order to understand it
better, let’s take an example of a language. Any language has its own set of
vocabulary and grammar which we need to know if we want to communicate in
that language. Similarly, over the internet whenever we access a website or
exchange some data with another device then these processes are governed
by a set of rules called the internet protocols.
Working of internet protocol: The internet and many other data networks
work by organizing data into small pieces called packets. Each large data sent
between two network devices is divided into smaller packets by the underlying
hardware and software. Each network protocol defines the rules for how its data
packets must be organized in specific ways according to the protocols the
network supports.

Types of Protocal

1.HTTP
 o HTTP stands for HyperText Transfer Protocol.
o It is a protocol used to access the data on the World Wide Web (www).
o The HTTP protocol can be used to transfer the data in the form of plain text, hypertext,
audio, video, and so on.
o This protocol is known as HyperText Transfer Protocol because of its efficiency that
allows us to use in a hypertext environment where there are rapid jumps from one
document to another document.
o HTTP is similar to the FTP as it also transfers the files from one host to another host. But,
HTTP is simpler than FTP as HTTP uses only one connection, i.e., no control connection to
transfer the files.
o HTTP is used to carry the data in the form of MIME-like format.
o HTTP is similar to SMTP as the data is transferred between client and server. The HTTP
differs from the SMTP in the way the messages are sent from the client to the server and
from server to the client. SMTP messages are stored and forwarded while HTTP
messages are delivered immediately.

2 FTP
o FTP stands for File transfer protocol.
o FTP is a standard internet protocol provided by TCP/IP used for transmitting the files
from one host to another.
o It is mainly used for transferring the web page files from their creator to the computer
that acts as a server for other computers on the internet.
o It is also used for downloading the files to computer from other servers.

Objectives of FTP
o It provides the sharing of files.
o It is used to encourage the use of remote computers.
o It transfers the data more reliably and efficiently.
3 SMTP
o SMTP stands for Simple Mail Transfer Protocol.
o SMTP is a set of communication guidelines that allow software to transmit an electronic
mail over the internet is called Simple Mail Transfer Protocol.
o It is a program used for sending messages to other computer users based on e-mail
addresses.
o It provides a mail exchange between users on the same or different computers, and it
also supports:
o It can send a single message to one or more recipients.
o Sending message can include text, voice, video or graphics.
o It can also send the messages on networks outside the internet.
o The main purpose of SMTP is used to set up communication rules between servers. The
servers have a way of identifying themselves and announcing what kind of
communication they are trying to perform. They also have a way of handling the errors
such as incorrect email address. For example, if the recipient address is wrong, then
receiving server reply with an error message of some kind.
Components of SMTP

o First, we will break the SMTP client and SMTP server into two components such as user
agent (UA) and mail transfer agent (MTA). The user agent (UA) prepares the message,
creates the envelope and then puts the message in the envelope. The mail transfer agent
(MTA) transfers this mail across the internet.

4 IMAP Protocol
IMAP stands for Internet Message Access Protocol. It is an application layer protocol
which is used to receive the emails from the mail server. It is the most commonly used
protocols like POP3 for retrieving the emails.

It also follows the client/server model. On one side, we have an IMAP client, which is a
process running on a computer. On the other side, we have an IMAP server, which is
also a process running on another computer. Both computers are connected through a
network.
The IMAP protocol resides on the TCP/IP transport layer which means that it implicitly
uses the reliability of the protocol. Once the TCP connection is established between the
IMAP client and IMAP server, the IMAP server listens to the port 143 by default, but this
port number can also be changed.

By default, there are two ports used by IMAP:

o Port 143: It is a non-encrypted IMAP port.

o Port 993: This port is used when IMAP client wants to connect through IMAP
securely.

5 POP3
The POP3 is a simple protocol and having very limited functionalities. In the case of the
POP3 protocol, the POP3 client is installed on the recipient system while the POP3
server is installed on the recipient's mail server.

Suppose sender wants to send the mail to receiver. First mail is transmitted to the
sender's mail server. Then, the mail is transmitted from the sender's mail server to the
receiver's mail server over the internet. On receiving the mail at the receiver's mail
server, the mail is then sent to the user. The whole process is done with the help of
Email protocols. The transmission of mail from the sender to the sender's mail server
and then to the receiver's mail server is done with the help of the SMTP protocol

. At the receiver's mail server, the POP or IMAP protocol

takes the data and transmits to the actual user.
Since SMTP is a push protocol so it pushes the message from the client to the server. As
we can observe in the above figure that SMTP pushes the message from the client to
the recipient's mail server. The third stage of email communication requires a pull
protocol, and POP is a pull protocol. When the mail is transmitted from the recipient
mail server to the client which means that the client is pulling the mail from the server.

MIME Protocol
MIME stands for Multipurpose Internet Mail Extensions. It is used to extend the
capabilities of Internet e-mail protocols such as SMTP. The MIME protocol allows the
users to exchange various types of digital content such as pictures, audio, video, and
various types of documents and files in the e-mail. MIME was created in 1991 by a
computer scientist named Nathan Borenstein at a company called Bell Communications.

MIME is an e-mail extension protocol, i.e., it does not operate independently, but it
helps to extend the capabilities of e-mail in collaboration with other protocols such
as SMTP. Since MIME was able to transfer only text written file in a limited size English
language with the help of the internet. At present, it is used by almost all e-mail related
service companies such as Gmail, Yahoo-mail, Hotmail.

Need of MIME Protocol

MIME protocol is used to transfer e-mail in the computer network for the following
reasons:

1. The MIME protocol supports multiple languages in e-mail, such as Hindi, French,
Japanese, Chinese, etc.
2. Simple protocols can reject mail that exceeds a certain size, but there is no word limit in
MIME.
3. Images, audio, and video cannot be sent using simple e-mail protocols such as SMTP.
These require MIME protocol.
4. Many times, emails are designed using code such as HTML and CSS, they are mainly
used by companies for marketing their product. This type of code uses MIME to send
email created from HTML and CSS.
Working diagram of MIME Protocol

What is XML.
XML stores data in plain text format. This provides a software- and hardware-
independent way of storing, transporting, and sharing data.

XML also makes it easier to expand or upgrade to new operating systems, new
applications, or new browsers, without losing data.

With XML, data can be available to all kinds of "reading machines" like people,
computers, voice machines, news feeds, etc.

With XML, the author must define both the tags and the document structure.

 XML stands for eXtensible Markup Language

 XML is a markup language much like HTML
 XML was designed to store and transport data
 XML was designed to be self-descriptive
 XML tags are not predefined like HTML tags are
 XML was designed to carry data - with focus on what data is

Difference between XML and HTML

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