HTML and CSS Reference
In-Depth Information
Web Server
(IIS)
HTTP Get
(URL)
HTML
Content
(Page)
HTML Post
(Post back)
Browser
(Internet Explorer, etc.)
Figure 1-1.
A simple page-centric web model
If the web page included a form with input fields, the browser would provide for this data to be entered.
When the page was submitted, this data was sent to the web server through an HTTP POST request. The web
application would do something with this data and then return an updated web page. The browser would then
render the entire page on the client.
here are two key aspects that I want to focus on here, that still have a significant influence even with today's
web environment:
•
The model is very page-centric.
•
There are both server and client aspects to web development.
Page Centric Web
As I mentioned, web sites are predominantly focused on web pages. A page is requested, returned, and rendered.
Data on a page is posted to the server, processed, and an updated page is returned and rendered. Because the
web server is stateless, it has no knowledge of previous pages that were returned. This is why the entire page must
be submitted and returned. Current and future technology is helping to move away from this paradigm and I'll
demonstrate many of these techniques throughout this topic. However, page-centric designs are still prevalent
and will likely to continue to be so for some time.
