Internet Technologies

The building blocks of the Internet are in the technologies that made the Web, mainly, protocols, browsers, servers, and the software systems that ran to enable advanced elements like Java, ActiveX and dynamic scripts (Treese, Stewart, 2003).

Internet protocols are the communication strings that allow information across the internet to be transmitted. The TCP/IP protocol has been adapted as the protocol for the Internet architecture; where the IP address is the number that is used to uniquely identify each computer on the global network. Its application layer protocol HTTP enables transmission of HTML pages the main format for documents on the Internet. With HTTP comes a set of protocols that allow for electronic messaging, other file types transfer, network connectivity, and mapping of links through the Internet. These services are covered by IMAP, FTP, NNTP, and Gopher respectively (HTTP Related Protocols) .

On the Internet computers that store information in the form of HTML pages are known as web servers, which are basically main server machines that have software to enable accessing these pages by typing a uniform resource locator (URL) identifying the server machine IP address. On the other hand, Internet users have normal PC machines that get connected to the Internet and type URL’s on a browser software that displays the web pages (Jeffrey Brown and others, Prosoft) .