Wildes Www

The target audience of this book is perhaps best described by how it was first used by the author himself: A draft version was chosen as the supporting text for a class of practitioners, who attended a continuing education course on WWW technology. The World Wide Web is undoubtedly the development of the decade in the media world. Since its beginnings in 1990, the WWW has evolved from a rather simple model of resource names (URL), a transfer protocol (HTTP), and a language for the description of interconnected information pages (HTML), to a far more complex infrastructure. This book gives a thorough technical description of all relevant WWW developments up to the time of writing, including the latest versions of the transfer protocol (HTTP/1.1) and description language (HTML 4.0), the foundations of the description language (SGML and its upcoming variant XML), style sheets (CSS1), server issues (SSL, CGI, and Apache as an example of a Web server), and some issues that will be of increasing importance in future (MathML, VRML, PNG). What is the difference between a URL and a URI? How does HTTP fulfill its task? Why do we need XML? What is it, and will it eventually replace HTML? This book gives answers to these questions and a chore of others that may be asked by attentive inhabitants of cyberspace. The book is, of course, not just a glossary of abbreviations and frequently used terms. It is rather a comprehensive and still succinct presentation of the technology used in the World Wide Web. It is surprising to note that, even though hundreds of books have been published that discuss the Web, there have been none, so far, to thoroughly explain the inner workings of this popular Internet application, which is so simple to use and yet so complex when it comes to really…