HTML and CSS Reference
In-Depth Information
[*]
At one time, a single nonprofit organization known as InterNIC handled that function. Now
ICANN.org coordinates U.S. government-related nameservers, but other organizations or individuals
must work through a for-profit company to register their unique domain names.
1.2.1. Clients, Servers, and Browsers
The Internet connects two kinds of computers:
servers
, which serve up
documents, and
clients
, which retrieve and display documents for us hu-
mans. Things that happen on the server machine are said to be on the
server side
, and activities on the client machine occur on the
client side
.
To access and display HTML documents, we run programs called
browsers
on our client computers. These browser clients talk to special
web servers
over the Internet to access, retrieve, and display electronic
documents.
A variety of browsers are available today. Internet Explorer comes with
Microsoft's operating system software, for example, while most other
browsers are free for download on the Web. And most browsers run
on client devices that have high-resolution, high-color graphical viewing
screens. In fact, today's browsers share common HTML-rendering soft-
ware under the hood, so to speak, and differ only by extraneous, albeit
some very useful features. For instance, when you install Netscape Nav-
igator version 8, you decide whether to use the NCSA Mosaic rendering
software, portions of which also are under Microsoft's Internet Explorer,
or Mozilla's software, which comes under the hood of another popular
browser, Firefox.
This is very different from around the turn of the century, when Internet
Explorer savagely competed with Netscape Navigator through unique
extensions to the HTML language. Internet Explorer won. Many of its ex-
tensions even became HTML standards, and others such as Netscape's
layout extensions disappeared and so got relegated to appendices in this
book.
