With the evolution of the World Wide Web from its conception in early 1990s and the introduction of Internet, back then, the concept of WWW was only revolutionary — home modem users connectivity was only able dialing up and connecting a bulletin board that was hosted by a single computer.
However, this has been changed in one swoop, making it by mid 1990s, there were about five million web browsers users.
The Game Changers: HTTP & HTML
When the internet was already in place and computers were starting connecting to it, Tim Berners-Lee, created a way of navigation between these two using a hyperlinking framework and created a markup language which came to known as HTTP or Hypertext Transfer Protocol and HTML or Hypertext Markup Language.
With these two, Berners-Lee successfully wrote the first web browser and web server to which we all now take for granted.
Understanding Berners-Lee’s Basics
To further understand, HTTP is the standard communication which governs both of the requests and responses that take place between the browser running on the web server and end user’s computer.
The Web Server’s job is to accept a request from the client and its attempt to reply, usually serving up the requested web page — that’s why the term Server is used.
Its counterpart is the Client, to which applies both to web browser and to computer to which its running. This interaction between these two often involves other devices (gateways, proxies, routers, etc) to which they has several roles to ensure that the requests and responses are correctly transferred between the client and the server. (Ultram) Typically, this uses Internet, in order to send the information.
The Request-Response Procedure
In basic level, the process of Request-Response consists of a web browser to which it asks the web server to send a web page. The web server then sending back the page, the browser displaying the requested page.
On the other hand, in an average web page, this process takes place once for each object in the page — an embedded video, file or even a CSS template. For this dynamic web pages, the procedure now involves both PHP and MySQL.