HTML and CSS Reference
In-Depth Information
Most web servers today use port 80; you need to include a port number
along with an immediately preceding colon in your URL if the target
server does not use port 80 for web communication.
When the Web was in its infancy, pioneer webmasters ran their Wild
Wild Web connections on all sorts of port numbers. For technical and
security reasons, system-administrator privileges are required to install
a server on port 80. Lacking such privileges, these webmasters chose
other, more easily accessible, port numbers.
Now that web servers have become acceptable and are under the care
and feeding of responsible administrators, documents being served on
some port other than 80 or 443 should make you wonder whether that
server is really on the up and up. Most likely, the maverick server is be-
ing run by a clever user unbeknownst to the server's bona fide system
administrators.
6.2.3.3. The http path
The document path is the Unix-style hierarchical location of the file in
the server's storage system. The pathname consists of one or more
names separated by slashes. All but the last name represent directories
leading down to the document. The last name is usually that of the doc-
ument itself, though the web server will typically default to a file called
index.html .
It has become a convention that for easy identification, HTML document
names end with the suffix .html (otherwise, they're plain ASCII text
files, remember?). Although recent versions of Windows allow longer
suffixes, old-time developers often stick to the three-letter .htm name
suffix for HTML documents.
Although the server name in a URL is not case-sensitive, the document
pathname may be. Because most web servers are run on Linux-based
systems, and Linux filenames are case-sensitive, those document path-
names will be case-sensitive, too. Web servers running on Windows ma-
chines are not case-sensitive, so those document pathnames are not.
Because it is impossible to know the operating system of the server you
 
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