how HTML works

[tunaizuy]

Hi.When I click on a URL and the web page comes up with all the elements like text, colors, images, etc....

Are the web pages actually (A) completed, self-contained pages sitting on the server waiting to be retrived? Or is it more like (B) the elements that make up the web page are sitting on the server and the HTML goes gets the different elements based on the code and puts them together to display the web page? Thanks

[George]

Hi tunaizuy

in the simplest case the web page is represented by one HTML file on the server. When you type in the URL the web server knows which file to send to your browser.

Your browser interprets the HTML code it retrieves and renders the page accordingly. The file contains paragraphs, tables and such and also the text. It might also contain information about the formatting, like font size etc.

Most times the formatting information are in a separate style sheet file. In that case the HTML your browser retrieves contains a link to it. The browser will then retrieve it too and use the formatting on the page.

Several elements in the web page will not be in that one file, e.g. images. But what the file contains, again, is a reference to where to find the image files and how and where on the page to display it.

Hope that explains it a bit.

[Ritho]

Originally Posted by tunaizuy

Or is it more like (B) the elements that make up the web page are sitting on the server and the HTML goes gets the different elements based on the code and puts them together to display the web page? Thanks

Many websites do work this way. Take a blog for instance. All the information in a blog post entry is store in a database. When a request is made for that post, the server side software (something like PHP or ASP but not HTML) pulls the needed information out of the database and assembles it into a html document which is then passed to browser. Usually a template is used the control how the resulting page will look. The advantage to this is only the actuall text information must be entered, none of the other html code has to be manually created.

So in actuality both of your scenarios are true. (A) Static html pages, and (B) dynamically created pages both live on the internet.

Any more questions?