web browser
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- WorldWideWeb FSF GNU.png -
WorldWideWeb for NeXT computer was the first browser (1991) (1)
A
Web browser is a
software application which enables a user to display and interact with text, images, videos, music, games and other information typically located on a
Web page at a
Web site on the
World Wide Web or a
local area network. Text and images on a Web page can contain
hyperlinks to other Web pages at the same or different Web site. Web browsers allow a user to quickly and easily access information provided on many Web pages at many Web sites by traversing these links. Web browsers format
HTML information for display, so the appearance of a Web page may differ between browsers.Web browsers are the most-commonly-used type of
HTTP user agent. Although browsers are typically used to access the World Wide Web, they can also be used to access information provided by
Web servers in
private networks or content in
file systems.
History
The history of the Web browser dates back to late 1980s, when a variety of technologies laid the foundation for the first Web browser, the
WorldWideWeb, by
Tim Berners-Lee in 1991. That browser brought together a variety of existing and new software and hardware technologies.Over the following years, Web browsers were introduced by companies like Mozilla, Netscape, Microsoft, Apple, and Opera. More recently, Google entered the browser market.
Current Web browsers
Some of the Web browsers currently available for
personal computers include
Internet Explorer,
Mozilla Firefox,
Safari,
Opera(2),
Avant Browser,
Konqueror,
Lynx,
Google Chrome,
Flock,
Arachne,
Epiphany,
K-Meleon and
AOL Explorer.
Protocols and standards
Web browsers communicate with
Web servers primarily using
Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP) to fetch
Web pages. HTTP allows Web browsers to submit information to Web servers as well as fetch Web pages from them. The most-commonly-used version of HTTP is HTTP/1.1, which is fully defined in
RFC 2616. HTTP/1.1 has its own required standards that Internet Explorer
does not fully support, but most other current-generation Web browsers do.Pages are located by means of a
URL (Uniform Resource Locator, RFC 1738), which is treated as an address, beginning with
http: for HTTP transmission. Many browsers also support a variety of other URL types and their corresponding protocols, such as
gopher: for
Gopher (a hierarchical hyperlinking protocol),
ftp: for
File Transfer Protocol (FTP),
rtsp: for
Real-time Streaming Protocol (RTSP), and
https: for
HTTPS (HTTP Secure, which is HTTP augmented by
Secure Sockets Layer or
Transport Layer Security).The
file format for a Web page is usually
HTML (HyperText Markup Language) and is identified in the HTTP protocol using a
MIME content type. Most browsers natively support a variety of formats in addition to HTML, such as the
JPEG,
PNG and
GIF image formats, and can be extended to support more through the use of
plugins. The combination of HTTP
content type and URL protocol specification allows Web-page designers to embed images, animations, video, sound, and
streaming media into a Web page, or to make them accessible through the Web page.Early Web browsers supported only a very simple version of HTML. The rapid development of proprietary Web browsers led to the development of non-standard dialects of HTML, leading to problems with Web interoperability. Modern Web browsers support a combination of standards-based and
de facto HTML and
XHTML, which should be rendered in the same way by all browsers. No browser fully supports HTML 4.01, XHTML 1.x or CSS 2.1 yet. Many sites are designed using
WYSIWYG HTML-generation programs such as
Adobe Dreamweaver or
Microsoft FrontPage. Microsoft FrontPage often generates non-standard HTML by default, hindering the work of the
W3C in promulgating standards, specifically with XHTML and
Cascading Style Sheets (CSS), which are used for page layout. Dreamweaver and other more modern Microsoft HTML development tools such as
Microsoft Expression Web and
Microsoft Visual Studio conform to the W3C standards.Some of the more popular browsers include additional components to support
Usenet news,
Internet Relay Chat (IRC), and
e-mail. Protocols supported may include
Network News Transfer Protocol (NNTP),
Simple Mail Transfer Protocol (SMTP),
Internet Message Access Protocol (IMAP), and
Post Office Protocol (POP). These browsers are often referred to as "
Internet suites" or "application suites" rather than merely Web browsers.
See also
References
-
[WEB,weblink Web Browser History, Stewart, William, 2008-02-02, ]
-
[Browser Market Share for Q1 2008. Market Share by Net Applications.com.]
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网页浏览器
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