Web Architecture: Short Description

The browsers (running for example Netscape) request documents from the Web Server by specifying a URL. A more sophisticated web site can allow browsers to return information back to the server. (The is what happens when you fill out a web form.) The web server passes this information to programs that the web site designers wrote, and then returns any results produced by the program back to the browser. (We will learn to write such programs in a subsequent lecture.) A sophisticated web site can also send whole programs to the browser, either in the form of Java, Javascript, or Active-X, which the browser then runs.

Steve Rozen, rozen@gaiberg.wi.mit.edu
Whitehead Institute for Biomedical Research

Last modified: Tue Oct 19 21:34:55 EDT 1999