Tim Berners-Lee, a British scientist, invented the World Wide Web (WWW) in 1989, while working at CERN. The Web was originally conceived and developed to meet the demand for automated information-sharing between scientists in universities and institutes around the world.
The basic idea of the WWW was to merge the evolving technologies of computers, data networks and hypertext into a powerful and easy to use global information system.
A link which can redirect you to some other link or path is known as Hyper link
The web pages we see now a days are a lot more different. The web pages that were initially designed were very basic.
It was felt that there is a need to make them look better to which we actually started working on the design of the web page. To add design to a webpage we used CSS
The webpages designed using HTML and CSS are not interactive.
Javascript is used to add the interactivity to the webpages.
This is how the things have eventually grown. Multiple versions of HTML and CSS came with multiple features added to them.
To summarize the evolution of web technologies click here
Architecture that WorldWideWeb use is client-server architecture.
When we browse a website from our browsers the code for the web site we are browsing must be stored somewhare in a computer. That computer is known as the Server. And the Client is the browser. These two are seprate maschines and are not connected to each other in any sense.
So, browser has to connect and request for the resource (HTML file) from the server and server will respond to the request with the code and then we'll be albe to see the webpage on our browser.
Client-Server architecture has two entities:
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Client is the entity which request the resource.
In this case browser is the client.
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Server is the entity which have the resource and can respond to the request made by client and give the client the requested resource.
If the content served to all the users is same. Such websites are called static websites. Example: Portfolio Websites, other read-only websites.
Dynamic Websites are te websites which servers user specific data to the browser request. Example: Facebook, Instagram and the list goes on...
The complete Client-Server Architecture have two portions to it.
- Client-Side Section
- Server-Side Section
Client-Side Section is our browser. When we are opening a website in our browser. Browser is not worried about the content of the website. All the browser does is request the server for the resource. Server has to decide that what content to serve. Weather it has to serve same content to everybody or it has to apply some logic to serve the user specific content, that is the headache of the server, browser is not taking that pain. What browser does is it request the server and receives the requested resources from the server. At browser's end all we are concerned about is that we should have all the files to display the content. Browser than randers the files and show the content to the user.
At the client side the term we commonly use is Front End.
If we as facebook users are contancting the facebook servers. The first step the facebook server will take is , it will figure out that if we are valid users or not. That means in this case server has a database where it is storing the list of all users, and if we are putting up a request then the server will fetch the data from the database regarding our username and and will check that we are valid users or not. If we are valid users then server will perform some logic and calculations to figure out that what is the right content to be served for this request made by ourselves.
So, that intern means that what data to show , who to show is handled by the server. The code to make that happen is the server code or the back-end code.
Back-end is the term we generally use for server-side.
Suppose we want to visit www.google.com. It means we want to connect to the server of google.
Ideally we should know the ip adress in order to facilitate the communication between our browser and the server. But we generally dont typein the ip address all we type is google.com. We type in the domain name of the gooele server. To get the ip adress DNS (Domain Name System) comes into poicture. Remembering ip address for the amount of sites we visit daily is really next to impossible. So thats why we have the domain names.
After entering the domain name in the browser, browser will contact ISP (Internet Service Proveder) and will make a request for the ip address for the domain we've entered. Then ISP (Internet Service Proveder) will conduct a domain name search to get browser the dezired ip adress and returns the relevent result to the browser.
After having the ip adress the browser establishes the connection to the server directly for furthur communication.
Browser genrally tries cacheing the commonly searched URL(S) and their ip adress(s)