The World Wide Web is a system for displaying text, graphics, and audio retrieved over the Internet on a computer monitor. Each retrieval unit is known as a Web page, and such pages frequently contain “links” that allow related pages to be retrieved. HTML (hypertext markup language) is the markup language for encoding Web pages. It was designed by Tim Berners-Lee at the CERN nuclear physics laboratory in Switzerland during the 1980s and is defined by an SGML DTD. HTML markup tags specify document elements such as headings, paragraphs, and tables. They mark up a document for display by a computer program known as a Web browser. The browser interprets the tags, displaying the headings, paragraphs, and tables in a layout that is adapted to the screen size and fonts available to it.
HTML documents also contain anchors, which are tags that specify links to other Web pages. An anchor has the form <A HREF= “http://www.britannica.com”> Encyclopædia Britannica</A>, where the quoted string is the URL (universal resource locator) to which the link points (the Web “address”) and the text following it is what appears in a Web browser, underlined to show that it is a link to another page. What is displayed as a single page may also be formed from multiple URLs, some containing text and others graphics.
HTML does not allow one to define new text elements; that is, it is not extensible. XML (extensible markup language) is a simplified form of SGML intended for documents that are published on the Web. Like SGML, XML uses DTDs to define document types and the meanings of tags used in them. XML adopts conventions that make it easy to parse, such as that document entities are marked by both a beginning and an ending tag, such as <BEGIN>…</BEGIN>. XML provides more kinds of hypertext links than HTML, such as bidirectional links and links relative to a document subsection.
Because an author may define new tags, an XML DTD must also contain rules that instruct a Web browser how to interpret them—how an entity is to be displayed or how it is to generate an action such as preparing an e-mail message.
Web pages marked up with HTML or XML are largely static documents. Web scripting can add information to a page as a reader uses it or let the reader enter information that may, for example, be passed on to the order department of an online business. CGI (common gateway interface) provides one mechanism; it transmits requests and responses between the reader’s Web browser and the Web server that provides the page. The CGI component on the server contains small programs called scripts that take information from the browser system or provide it for display. A simple script might ask the reader’s name, determine the Internet address of the system that the reader uses, and print a greeting. Scripts may be written in any programming language, but, because they are generally simple text-processing routines, scripting languages like PERL are particularly appropriate.
Another approach is to use a language designed for Web scripts to be executed by the browser. JavaScript is one such language, designed by the Netscape Communications Corp., which may be used with both Netscape’s and Microsoft’s browsers. JavaScript is a simple language, quite different from Java. A JavaScript program may be embedded in a Web page with the HTML tag <script language=“JavaScript”>. JavaScript instructions following that tag will be executed by the browser when the page is selected. In order to speed up display of dynamic (interactive) pages, JavaScript is often combined with XML or some other language for exchanging information between the server and the client’s browser. In particular, the XMLHttpRequest command enables asynchronous data requests from the server without requiring the server to resend the entire Web page. This approach, or “philosophy,” of programming is called Ajax (asynchronous JavaScript and XML).
VB Script is a subset of Visual Basic. Originally developed for Microsoft’s Office suite of programs, it was later used for Web scripting as well. Its capabilities are similar to those of JavaScript, and it may be embedded in HTML in the same fashion.
Behind the use of such scripting languages for Web programming lies the idea of component programming, in which programs are constructed by combining independent previously written components without any further language processing. JavaScript and VB Script programs were designed as components that may be attached to Web browsers to control how they display information.