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Exposure to Computer Disciplines
Notes is trivial compared with the human time saved, typically seconds as compared with weeks.
Many high level languages have appeared since Fortran II (and many have also disappeared!),
among the most widely used have been:
COBOL: Business applications
FORTRAN: Engineering & Scientific Applications
PASCAL: General use and as a teaching tool
C & C++: General Purpose - currently most popular
PROLOG: Artificial Intelligence
JAVA: General Purpose - gaining popularity rapidly
All these languages are available on a large variety of computers.
11.4 World Wide Web (WWW) Development Language
The World Wide Web, abbreviated as WWW or W3 and commonly known as the Web, is a
system of interlinked hypertext documents accessed via the Internet. With a web browser,
one can view web pages that may contain text, images, videos, and other multimedia and
navigate between them via hyperlinks. Using concepts from earlier hypertext systems, English
engineer and computer scientist Sir Tim Berners-Lee, now the Director of the World Wide Web
Consortium, wrote a proposal in March 1989 for what would eventually become the World
Wide Web.
“The World-Wide Web was developed to be a pool of human knowledge, and human culture,
which would allow collaborators in remote sites to share their ideas and all aspects of a common
project?”
11.4.1 Function
The terms Internet and World Wide Web are often used in everyday speech without much
distinction. However, the Internet and the World Wide Web are not one and the same. The
Internet is a global system of interconnected computer networks. In contrast, the Web is one of
the services that runs on the Internet. Viewing a web page on the World Wide Web normally
begins either by typing the URL of the page into a web browser, or by following a hyperlink
to that page or resource. The web browser then initiates a series of communication messages,
behind the scenes, in order to fetch and display it. First, the browser resolves the server-name
portion of the URL (en.wikipedia.org) into an Internet Protocol address using the global,
distributed Internet database known as the Domain Name System (DNS); this lookup returns
an IP address such as 208.80.152.2. The browser then requests the resource by sending an HTTP
request across the Internet to the computer at that particular address. It makes the request to
a particular application port in the underlying Internet Protocol Suite so that the computer
receiving the request can distinguish an HTTP request from other network protocols such as
e-mail delivery; the HTTP protocol normally uses port 80. The content of the HTTP request can
be as simple as the two lines of text.
The computer receiving the HTTP request delivers it to Web server software listening for requests
on port 80. If the web server can fulfill the request it sends an HTTP response back to the browser
indicating success, which can be as simple as:
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