Browsing Around the Internet Shopping Mall: The World Wide Web

Browsing Around the Internet Shopping Mall: The World Wide Web

Back in Chapter 2, "A Network's Reason for Existence," you had a brief look at how the World Wide Web works. In many ways, the web works a lot like the retail model for businesses. In fact, when a retailer decides to offer goods for sale on the web, the retailer can use many of the same business processes that it uses with its bricks and mortar stores to support its Internet sales operations.

In case you do not remember the details from Chapter 2, here are some quick reminders. The end user PC uses software called a web browser, or simply a browser. When talking about e-mail and FTP, you refer to the software on the end user's PC as an e-mail client or an FTP client, respectively. Along the same line of reasoning, with the web, you could use the term web client to refer to the web browser software on an end user PC, but most people use the term "web browser" instead.

The other end of the story depends on someone to create a website, which is located on a web server. With FTP, someone had to put files on the FTP server before it had useful files for other FTP users to retrieve. Similarly, with web servers, someone must create some content and put it on the web server before the end user can do anything useful.

The information that sits on a web server, which end users can view with a web browser, is generically called web content, or simply content. Content consists of individual web pages, the collection of which is called a website. Figure 8-13 shows many of the concepts and the process.