HTML and CSS Reference
In-Depth Information
scriptive suffix is often assignedtypically a two-letter abbreviation of the country name, such as "jp" for
Japan and "de" for Deutschland. Many organizations around the world now use the generic three-letter
suffixes in place of the more conventional two-letter national suffixes.
It has become something of a convention that webmasters name their
servers www for quick and easy identification on the Web. For instance,
O'Reilly Media's web server's name is www, which, along with the
publisher's domain name, becomes the very easily remembered web
site,
www.oreilly.com
.
Similarly, MobileRobots' web server is named
www.mobilerobots.com
.
Being a nonprofit organization, the World Wide
Web Consortium's main server has a different domain suffix:
www.w3c.org
.
The naming convention has very obvious benefits, which
you, too, should take advantage of if you are called upon to create a
web server for your organization.
You may also specify the address of a server using its numerical IP ad-
dress. The address is a sequence of four numbers, 0 to 255, separated
by periods. Valid IP addresses look like 137.237.1.87 or 192.249.1.33.
It'd be a dull diversion to tell you now what the numbers mean or how
to derive an IP address from a domain name, particularly because you'll
rarely, if ever, use one in a URL. Rather, this is a good place to hyper-
link: pick up any good Internet networking treatise for rigorous detail on
IP addressing, such as Ed Krol's
The Whole Internet User's Guide and
Catalog
(O'Reilly).
6.2.3.2. The http port
The
port
is the number of the communication port by which the client
browser connects to the server. It's a networking thingservers perform
many functions besides serving up web documents and resources to cli-
ent browsers: electronic mail, FTP document fetches, filesystem sharing,
and so on. Although all that network activity may come into the server
on a single wire, it's typically divided into software-managed "ports" for
service-specific communicationssomething analogous to boxes at your
local post office.
The default URL port for web servers is 80. Special secure web server-
sSecure HTTP (SHTTP) or Secure Sockets Layer (SSL)run on port 443.
