The World Wide Web, or what is now known as simply: The Web, has a short but detailed history and a profound integration into our daily lives. It's utility as a medium of communication and presentation seems limitless. Harnessing the power to create websites shall be the goal of this course.

The significant entities that underlie a connection

Among other concrete and conceptual entities that make the presentation and interactability of a website possible, the most fundamental ones you should know are: the client and the server.

In the World Wide Web, the client and server refer to computer programs that exist on the opposite ends of a connection, where the client is the one that initiates a connection to a server for the request of a resource and a server accepts connections from multiple clients to share resources with them.

In the case of web clients and web servers, the client first attempts to establish a connection with the server. If that server accepts the connection, then for the duration of that connection: the client and server exchange messages using the HTTP.

HTTP is set of rules and meanings for computer programs to facilitate the exchange of information on the world wide web.

The type of message that an HTTP client sends to an HTTP server is known as an HTTP request and the type of message that an HTTP server sends in response to a request is known as an HTTP response.

An HTTP request is an HTTP message sent from an HTTP client to an HTTP server for the request a resource that is identified by a URI. An HTTP response is an HTTP message sent from an HTTP server to an HTTP client containing the status and/or contents of a resource that was requested by the HTTP client.

The Uniform Resource Identifier

A web browser is a type of HTTP client that is user interactive and user friendly, most of them display the URI of a web site or other resource in the address bar.

A URI is an encoded sequence of characters that identifies some resource.

The components of a URI are: a scheme, an optional authority, a path, an optional query, and an optional fragment.

The URI foo://example.com:8042/over/there?name=ferret#nose is composed of:

• "foo" for it's scheme
• "example.com:8042" for it's authority
• "/over/there" for it's path
• "name=ferret" for it's query
• "nose" for it's fragment

The scheme component indicates how the rest of the URI is to be interpreted and how the resource it refers to is to be transmitted and presented. The authority component usually contains a host identifier (such as "google.com") which identifies the server. The path component generally identifies a resource that is local to the authority, such as a file or web page on the server. The query component is a collection of variables that the server can use to determine how to generate the content of the requested resource. The fragment component usually identifies a section within the resource to navigate to.

The languages that describe a web page

Most resources that clients request are web documents or web pages; their contents are described in the HyperText Markup Language (HTML), a markup language that a web browser can process and present in a visual and auditory form to the user.

While HTML code describes the general structure and content of a web page, Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) code describes the style in which the elements of a web page should be rendered. The styling of an HTML element may include, among other things, it's size, color, positioning, margins, and borders.

JavaScript is a programming language that can be used to describe the interactive behavior of a web page, aside from merely being able to click on links.

Together, these 3 artificial languages make up the main languages of web development.