WWW Architecture

1. Web Browser software (eg IE, Firefox, Mozilla, Camino, etc, Netscape, Opera, Safari, iCab, OmniWeb, lynx, Amaya, Mosaic, or even (for the truly desperate) Emacs/W3 -- and this is by no means an exhaustive list!).
    
   
2. Web server software. The most popular server program is apache -- this is what we run on ironbark., and redgum however there are several other popular server packages, especially those from Microsoft.
    
   
3. A collection of "hyperlinked" documents (or pages) written in HTML (the HyperText Markup Language), as well as a great number of other object types (eg, images, sounds, video clips, etc).
    
   
4. The HyperText Transfer Protocol, HTTP. The browser uses HTTP to obtain Web documents, specified using a URL, from a server. For example, the "home page" of ironbark is:

   http://ironbark.bendigo.latrobe.edu.au/index.html
   

   This specifies the application protocol (HTTP) used to fetch the object, the domain name where it is located and the local filename of the object on that host (/index.html). The "magic" string :// doesn't mean anything in particular except to signify that it's a URL...