WEB PROGRAMMING

UNIT I
INTRODUCTION
 The World Wide Web (WWW) is a collection of linked documents, or pages, stored on
millions of computers and spread over the entire Internet.
 The term WWW comes from the notion that individual nodes of information are linked with
hypertext, and this creates a ‘web’ of information.
 The documents on the web are written in HTML (Hypertext Markup Language) that defines their
appearance and layout, and creates the links to other documents.
 These links appear in text as an underlined word or phrase, colored in blue called hypertext link
or hypermedia.
 You can access sites all over the world.
 You can connect from your personal computer to thousands of web servers simply by clicking on
a hyperlink, or by entering a specific address.
The Web and the Internet
 The Web is that it is built in the Internet.
 The basis for the web is the Internet.
 The Web makes use of many of the mechanisms that Internet provides.
 The Internet is the physical aspects – computers, networks and services.
 It allows us to connect to thousands of other computers across the world.
 The Web is an abstraction and common set of services on top of the Internet.
 It is the set of the protocols and tools that let us share information with each other.
 The Web was developed with the concept of ‘universal readership’ ie, any participating system
should be able to read the information on any connected system using a common set of tools
such as WWW servers or WWW browsers.
Evolution of World Wide Web
 Tim Berners-Lee, a British engineer working at CERN (Conseil Europeenne pour la Recherche
Nuclearie) has a bright idea to make CERN’s mountain of research documents more accessible
and manageable.
 Berners-Lee had this idea of universal readership, that the text of each document could contain
references (or links) to other documents.
 And these links would be live, so that the reader could make an immediate move directly to the
document being referred to, or even to specific place in it.
 It was not an entirely new concept.
 Hypertext, as it was called, was already available for use on some desktop computers.
 The new element was the idea of linking to documents on other computers on different networks.
 A new mega network was born World Wide Web (Web) in short.
 In the words of Tim Berners-Lee the World Wide Web is “the universe of network- accessible
information, an embodiment of human knowledge”.
 The first World Wide Web computers were created at CERN.
World Wide Web Consortium (W3C)
 The World Wide Web Consortium was created in October 1994 to lead the World Wide Web to
its full potential by developing common protocols that promote its evaluation and ensure its
interoperability.
 W3C has more than 400 member organizations around the world and has earned international
recognition for its contributions to the growth of the web.
 In just over five years, W3C has developed more than 20 technical specifications for the web’s
infrastructure.
 W3C is already laying the foundation for the next generation of the web.
 W3C’s technologies will help make the Web a robust, scalable and adaptive infrastructure for a
world of information.
Features of World Wide Web
1. The ability to easily deliver information in any format, to/from a wide range of computing
platforms.
 On the web you can access information from many sources line your competitors,
customers, technology providers, international universities, financial institutions and
many other places.
 This information is on many different computing platforms.
 The web has become a standard method of providing distributed information to many
different platforms.
2. Simplified access to the Internet
 It provides a graphical interface.
 It supports multimedia (sound, video, as well as graphics).
 It is based on standards, so sharing of documents is much easier than before.
3. The easy availability of extensive information on a wide range of topics
 The web contains an endless variety of information including up-to-the minute weather
maps or traffic reports, online publications, language lessons with sample pronunciations.
 Movies, simulations and resource information on almost every topic.
4. The Web is interactive
 Interactivity is the ability to ‘talk back’.
 The act of selecting a link and jumping to another Web page to go somewhere else on the
Web is a form of interactivity.
Uses of World Wide Web
The Web is used in many creative and interesting ways today, and new applications are being
introduced every day.
1. Education tool
 As the World Wide Web allows universal access to words, pictures, graphics and
sounds of all kinds, it allows faculty and students to share information in ways never
before possible.
 Some academic uses of the Web include research, electronic journals, sharing
information, etc.
2. Search tool
 One of the most commonly used capabilities of the Web is its ability to help you locate
just about anything.
 Several Web sites are designed to help you in that regard.
3. Business Tool
 Web is used by companies all over the world for various purposes, for external
communication, to share product information, to learn about the marketplace, to share in
process work with business partners and for internal sharing of information.
Some of the topics that are particular available on the Web are:
1. Travel: Transport, maps, tourism and accommodation.
2. Entertainment: Film and theatre, TV, online music, radio and video and fan clubs.
3. Leisure activities: Sports, hobbies and crafts.
4. Company information: Reports, products and services
5. Academic: Education and research information.
6. Communications: E-mail, news and discussion groups, and online chat.
7. Commerce: online shopping, auctions and private sales.

World Wide Web Servers

 Computers that are connected to the Internet and that contain files that their owners have made
publicly available are called Web servers.
  There are many Web server software applications including public domain software from NCSA
and Apache and commercial packages from Microsoft like IIS (Internet Information Server),
Netscape and others.
 In client/server software architecture all applications have two components: the client component
and the server component.
 The server and client components typically have the following characteristics:

1. A server is most often centralized, usually on a large computer. A client usually runs in
multiple instances on desktops or other small stations throughout a network.
2. A server is passive. It does little or nothing until it receives an explicit request from a client
to do something. A client is active since it is a tool in the hands of a user.
3. A server usually runs continuously waiting for requests while a client runs only on demand.
4. A server usually runs in the background and interfaces only with other software and rarely
interfaces directly with users whereas a client is usually invoked by a user and takes
commands from a user.
5. A server must handle multiple tasks concurrently since many clients may be requesting its
services simultaneously. A client usually works for one person and does one thing after
another in sequence as the user commands it.
 Web server is used to publish the documents on the web.
 It is responsible for document storage and retrieval.
 It sends the document requested back to the requesting client.
World Wide Web Browsers
 A web browser also known as web client, is a software interface.
 It enables you to read web pages and move from an HTML document on one computer to
another HTML document on any other computer on the Internet.
 Mosaic was the first browser, while Netscape and Internet Explorer are the commonly used
browsers now-a-days.
 Both of these are graphical browsers, (ie) they can display graphics as well as text.
 Most modern web browsers can present multimedia information including sound and video,
through they require plug-ins for some formats.
 Depending on the web browser used, the final appearance of a document may vary significantly.
Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP)
 HTTP is the internet protocol responsible for transferring and displaying web pages.
 When HTTP link is pass through, the browser will connect to the appropriate machine, retrieve
the document and close the connection.
 The HTTP server will tell the browser about the type of document it is sending so that browser at
the client side can display it correctly.
 It provides a way for web clients and servers to communicate with one another, primarily
through the exchange of messages from clients and servers.
 The message types for HTTP are classified in four parts:
1. Connection: This type of message occurs when a client tries to connect to a specific web
server and displays a Connecting to HTTP server message. If the client can’t make the
connection, the attempts will usually time out and the browser displays a Connection timed
out message.
2. Request: This is where the client asks for the Web resource it’s looking for. This includes
the protocol to be used, the name of the object to be provided and information about how the
server should respond to the client.
3. Response: If the server can deliver the requested object, it responds in the manner requested
by the client to deliver the necessary data. If it can’t deliver, it sends an error message
explaining the reason for not delivering the message.
4. Close: After the information has been transferred in response to the request, the connection
between client and server will be closed.
Universal Resource Locator (URL)
  A web browser receives information from web servers and presents that information to the end
user.
 To request information from the server, the browser uses a special addressing scheme known as a
Universal Resource Locator.
 URLs are used globally to name and access all web resources.
Syntax:
Protocol/data source://domain name: port number/ <directory path>/ <object name>#<spot>
Example:
http://www.yahoo.com/education/FIIT/home.htm
 The URL is composed of six parts:
1. Protocol/Data Source: For network resources, this will usually be the name of the protocol
used to access the data that resides on the other end of the link.
Syntax:
 ftp:// points to a file accessible through the FTP protocol.
 gopher:// points to a file system index accessible through the gopher protocol.
 http:// points to a hypertext document accessible through the hypertext transfer protocol.
 mailto:// links to an application that allows you to compose a message to be sent to a
predefined address using e-mail.
 news:// points to a usenet newsgroup and uses the network news transfer protocol (NNTP)
to access the information.
 telnet:// links to a remote login on another internet computer, typically to select from a
system of indexed databases.
 WAIS:// points to a Wide Area Information Server on the Internet and provides access to a
system of indexed database.
 file:// which indicates that it’s a local file, rather than a public Web page.
2. Domain Name: This is the name for the Web server where the desired web page or other
resource resides. A domain name system locates on organization on other entity on the
Internet, i.e. it translates the easily recognizable server names into IP addresses.
IP addresses are the addresses which the IP protocol uses to identify hosts and to route data
to them. Every host must be assigned an IP address that can be used in actual
communications.
DNS is used to convert an IP address to specific domain name.
3. Port Address: The default port address is ‘80’. This number identifies which process address
a web session needs to connect with.
4. Directory Path: This is the location of the web page in the web server’s file system.
5. Object Name: This is the actual name of the HTML file for the desired web page or the
name of the other resource that may be required.
6. Spot: Sometimes, getting users to the HTML file is not enough. You would want to drop
them at a particular location within the file. By preceding the name of an HTML anchor with
a hash sign (#) and taking it into the HTML file name, you can direct a browser to jump to a
specific location.
Web Pages and Web Sites
 A web page is a page containing information and instructions.
 The information can be text, images, audio or video.
 The instructions tell the browser how to present the information to the end-user.
 Instructions are specified in Hyper Text Markup Language (HTML).
 A web site is a collection of related Web pages (files) stored on a web server.
 Web sites are hosted on web servers.
 Some companies and organizations own and maintain their own web server to host their own
web site.
Home Page
 Home page is the cover of a particular web site.
  The home page is the main or opening panel for a company, educational institutions, government
or individual web site.

WWW and Hypertext

 The glue that holds the web together is hyperlink.
 A hyperlink is an element in an electronic document that links to another place in the same
document or to an entirely different document.
 They are the foundation of the web, they tie the world’s content together letting us surf from
page to page.
 An HTML document is a text file that provides instructions to a web browser telling it how to
assemble and display a multimedia content.
 The most important feature of HTML document is the ability to include ‘links’ references to
other web documents.
 When reading a document and come across a link, just point-and-click and browser will retrieve
the referenced document.
 The internal language of the web is hypertext.
 Whenever a hyperlink is held, clicking on it makes the browser connect to the linked page.
 A hyperlinked phrase or image has attached to it the URL – the Internet address of another page,
clicking on the phrase or image makes the web browser pick up this URL and send it down the
line to the remote computer,
 The links are processed and the documents are transferred using HTTP.
 That is why the URLs of web pages start with http://.
 Hyperlinks are of two types: hypertext and hypermedia.
 The term hypertext is used to describe text that contains links to other text.
 Hypermedia is an extension to hypertext that supports linking graphics, sound and video
elements in addition to text elements.
How the Web Works
 The web is an example of client/server computing.
 You are using a client program, IE or Netscafe Navigator, to retrieve information from a server
computer.
 The server is responsible for transmitting the document, while your client software is responsible
for displaying it.
 The web client (Browser) sends a request in the form of an http message to the web server.
 The web server sends the document requested back to the requesting client.
 The client interprets and presents the document and the connection is ended.
 The language that web clients and servers use to communicate with each other is called the
Hyper Text Transfer Protocol (HTTP).
 All web clients and servers must be able to speak HTTP in order to send and receive hypermedia
documents.
 Web servers are often called HTTP servers or HTTP Daemons (HTTPD).
A Sample Web Request
 You are using a browser and you click on a reference to Yahoo. The browser is able to figure out
that what you really want is the object the web known as http://www.yahoo.com/index.html - the
URL or web address for Yahoo.
 The browser sends your request to the right web server, i.e the server which handles requests for
www.yahoo.com. In the message sent, there is a lot of information you don’t need to see like the
method to be used, the URL, possibly parameters and other information.
 When the message reaches the web server, also known as the httpd, it knows where it stores web
objects.
 If the document contains several web objects, the server will send each of these objects back
individually.
  Your browser collects together the different pieces you requested and presents the finished
product to you.
 Six steps normally happens when you fire up your web browser and visit a site on the World
Wide Web.
1. Your browser decodes the URL and contacts the server.
2. Your browser requests a document from the server.
3. The server translates the URL into a path and file name.
4. The server sends the document file to the browser.
5. The server breaks the connection.
6. Your browser displays the document.
 The important point is that after the server has responded, it breaks the connection.
 If the document you get back has links to other documents, your browser goes through the whole
routine again.
 Each request yields a single document.
 This is what’s known as stateless connection.
 Most browsers keep a local copy, called a cache, of recently accessed documents.
Search Engine
 A search engine or search tool is a computer program that will search its database to find items
whose text contains all or at least one of the words given to it.
 The home page contains a dialog box or frame where you type in a keyword or phrase.
 Click on a button labeled Search or Submit and then the search begins.
 The search engine then examines a database for items that contains the key words.
 The database consists of a large collection of information the search program has gathered from
the WWW.
 The search engine then brings back the search results – a list of hyperlinks and in some cases, a
summary of the information found by clicking on each hyperlink.
 The search results are used in the same way as any other web page.
 Some of the popular search engines are google, altavista, excite, lycos etc.
 The following are steps show how to search for relevant information on the World Wide Web.
1. Find a Search Engine
 A search engine is one of the most useful tools on the Internet.
 First select a search engine.
 Google, which is easy to use and offers lots of useful searching options.
 Start by typing www.google.com into your browser’s address window and press
enter.
2. Key in the words
 Type the keyword or phrase in search query box at the top of the page.
 For example we want to search about the cricket super star kapil dev.
 Type the word kapil dev into the search query box and then click the button google
search.
 We can search in particular language by clicking on language tools
3. Look at the results
 Google will show you a page of links which, when clicked, take you to another web
page which is linked to your query.
 Just scroll down the page to see the results.
 Click the blue underlined text to go to it.
4. Getting more advanced
 If you are after specific information, scroll down to the bottom of your search results
and click the blue text that says ‘Advanced Search’.
 This will let you search for exact phrase, language, file format, by date and etc.
 You can choose one of the 30 different languages.
Categories of Search Engines
  There are two kinds of search services on the web directories and engines.
 Search directories are hierarchical databases with references to web sites.
 The web sites that are included are hand picked by human beings and classified according to the
rules of the particular search service.
 Yahoo is the most popular search directory.
 The different categories of the search engines are:
1. Meta-Search Engines:
 In this you submit keywords in its search box, and it transmits your search
simultaneously to several individual search engines and their databases of web pages.
 With a few seconds, you get back results from all the search engines queried.
 It do not own a database of web pages, they send your search terms to the databases
maintained by search engine companies.
 The idea of meta-searching is much better than the reality in most cases.
 You would think you save a lot of time by searching only in one place and sparing the
need to use and learn several separate search engines.
 Ex: SurfWax, qbsearch
2. News Search Engines:
 It is designed to search for latest news stories from hundreds of sources on the web.
 It provides good results for current event searching, because they crawl only news
and revisit these sites several times a day.
 The results are usually focused and timely.
 Ex: http://news .yahoo.com/, is a yahoo news search engine.
3. Kids Search Engines:
 It is designed primarily to serve the needs of the children.
 These usually include sites that deal with violence, hate speech, gambling and drug
use.
 Yahooligans is a unique service designed for kids of ages 7 to 12.
4. Multimedia Search Engines:
 It helps you to locate sound, image or video files.
 Ex: AltaVista Photo Finder
5. Legal Search Engines:
 It is designed to help you find legal information and law-related web sites.
 Ex: LawCrawler.
Searching Criterion
 Search engines use software ‘robots’ or ‘spiders’ to survey the web and built their databases.
 Spiders or robots are software programs, the search engine companies create to search
thoroughly the web and index sites.
 Web documents are retrieved and indexed.
 There are two primary methods of text searching:
1. Keyword Searching:
 Most search engines do their text query and retrieval using keywords.
 Words that are mentioned towards the top of a document and words that are repeated
several times throughout the document are more likely to be defined important.
 Some sites index every word on every page. Others index only part of the document.
 Ex: Lycos
2. Concept-based Searching:
 Unlike keyword search systems, concept-based search systems try to determine what
you mean, not just what you say.
 A concept-based search returns hits on documents that are about the subject.
 Excite is currently the best-known general-purpose search engine site on the web that
relies on concept-based searching.
  This is also known as clustering which essentially means that words are examined in
relation to other words found nearby.
Web Browser
 Web browser or simply browser is a software application that relies on a computer and is used to
locate and display web pages.
 A browser contains the basic software you need in order to find, retrieve, view and send
information over the internet.
 It allows you to send and receive electronic mail messages worldwide.
 To read messaged from newsgroup about thousands of topics in which users share information
and options.
 To browse the World Wide Web where you can find a rich variety of text, graphics and
interactive information.
 The best-known and most frequently used browsers are Netscafe and Internet Explorer owned by
Microsoft.
 Both are graphical browsers, which means that they can display graphics as well as text, and can
be used to view and interact with many multimedia formats, including sound, video and other
programs.
Popular Web Browsers
 Each browser has its own abilities and the major browsers are not entirely compatible in
displaying HTML.
 What works in one, doesn’t necessarily work with other and site may even look different
depending on the kind of browser used.
 Most commonly used web browsers are:
1. Microsoft Internet Explorer
 It is also known as ‘IE’.
 On August 23rd, 1995, Microsoft released their Windows 95 operating system,
including a Web browser called Internet Explorer.
 Different versions of IE are available for Windows, Mac and UNIX.
 Internet Explorer was developed after Netscape began to turn the computer world
upside down with its Navigator browser.
 Netscafe’s browser was a purchased product, Microsoft made Internet Explorer free.
 Since Microsoft integrated the browser into Windows 98, Internet Explorer has
become the market leader.
2. Netscape Navigator
 It is web browser for Windows, Macintosh, and X Windows from Netscape.
 It is introduced in 1994, Navigator or simply Netscafe, as it is commonly called,
quickly became the leading Web browser.
3. NCSA Mosaic
 It is first widely used Web browser.
 It was created by Mark Andreesen of the University of Illinois.
 National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) and released on the
Internet in early 1993.
 Originally developed for UNIX, it was soon ported to Windows.
 It is the most popular non-commercial Web browser.
 The NCSA stopped developing Mosaic in January 1997.
4. Lynx
 It is a text-based Web browser created at the University of Kansas.
 Lynx does not provide access to images, videos or audit but does allow you to read
the text of any WWW document and to select hypertext links in these documents.
 Lynx does not support the use of different fonts on page.
5. Opera
 It is a Web browser for Windows, Linux, etc developed at Telenor in 1994 and
commercialized by Opera in 1995, it is noted for its unique features, including its fast
 rendering of Web pages, built-in zoom and ability to print just a highlighted section
of the page.
 It can display multiple windows with only one instance of the program running,
which allows for example, a web page with many links to be kept in view in one
window while retrieving the linked pages in another.
Basic Features of a Web Browser
 Should display the latest HTML tags included in HTML 4.0 specification.
 Should support multiple sessions.
 Should be empowered with easy Web navigation tools such as history, search, home, bookmarks,
backward and forward buttons.
 Should connect with e-mail program, i.e, ability to send and receive mails.
 Should provide browser newsgroup access, i.e, option that will open newsgroups and allow to
post messages to specific newsgroup.
 Should support presentation of multimedia data in three ways:
1. Native Supports: Some image formats are supported natively by the browser. This means
that when the browser receives the image file, it presents the image as a part of the web page
in the browser window.
2. Plug-ins: It is a program usually shareware that ads function to your web browser, such as a
audio player, video player or compression utility. A plug-in is a set up within the browser so
that its functions occur right in the browser. Launched separately from the browser when
needed. It works in the window of browser. Netscape Navigator first popularized the use of
plug-in software.
3. Helper Programs: It is external applications launched by a web browser or Internet client
program to view non-native file formats and data types. The helper programs are not
integrated into the browser window like plug-ins.
Know Your Browser
 When you first launch your Web browser, usually by double-clicking on the icon on your
desktop, a predefined Web page appears.
 This page is referred to as your home page or start page.
 Both IE and Netscape Navigator look somewhat similar.
 Both normally contain the same sections offering fairly equivalent functions.
 The different parts are:
1. The Menu Bar
 It is at the top of the browser window.
 The menu bar offers a selection of things you can do with a Web page.
2. The Toolbar
 The row of buttons at the top of your web browser, known as the toolbar, helps you
travel through the Web, keeping track of where you’ve been.
 The Back button returns you to the previous page you’ve visited.
 Use the Forward button to return the page you just came from.
 Home takes you to whichever home page you’ve chosen.
 Refresh/Reload does just that, loads the Web page again. Sometimes all of the
elements of a web page haven’t loaded the first time, because the file transfer is
interrupted. When you download a web page, the data is cached, meaning it is stored
temporarily in your computer’s memory. The next time the web browser access it
from the cache. If a web page is updated frequently, as may be the case with the
news, sports scores or financial data, you won’t get the most current information. By
reloading the page, this timely data is updated from the web browser.
 Print lets you make a hard copy of the current page loaded in your browser.
 The Stop button stops the browser from loading the current page.
 Search connects to directories and search tools on the Microsoft or Netscape Web
sites.
 Favorites/Bookmarks lets you to record the addresses of Web sites you want to
revisit. Once you add a URL to your list, you can return to that Web page simply by
clicking on the link in your list, instead of retyping the entire address.
3. The Address Bar
 The address of the page you are viewing in your browser appears in the address field.
 Click once in the address field’s input space. This will highlight the address already
in the field. Pressing any key will delete the existing address and leave a cursor so
you can type in the new address.
 Type http:// at the start of the address. You have to type this in so that the browser
knows to look for the right kind of pages.
 Key in the rest of the address. Many corporations and organizations now have a
presence on the web.
 Press enter. The browser will attempt to find and open the site at the address. The
browser will return an error message, saying that the site is not found. This means
either the address you typed is incorrect or the site no longer exists at the address.
 By clicking the small triangle to the right of the Address box, you will get a drop-
down list of the most recent Web sites you have visited.
4. The Scroll Bar
 The vertical bar to the right of the browser lets you scroll down and up a Web page.
 You can do this by placing your arrow pointer on the top or down arrows and holding
down your left mouse key.
 Also place the pointer on the slider control, hold down the left mouse key and drag
the slider.
 If a web page is too wide to fit your screen, a horizontal scroll bar will appear at the
bottom on your browser.
5. The Status Bar
 The status bar present at the bottom of the window is where information about the
progress of a document you’ve chosen appears, and where the URL of a link displays
before you click on it.
E-Mail
 Communications is basic to human interaction.
 If e-mail is loosely defined as ‘messages transmitted electronically’, then the first e-mail message
would have started in the last century with telegraph messages.
 During 1960s and 1970s many companies which were using mainframes and mini computers
also used e-mail facilities on those companies began to connect their central systems to branch
offices and subsidiaries, the employees were able to send e-mail to their employees of that
company.
 It has redefined the ways of communication and helped in reaching to the people in an
inexpensive and quicker way.
 Many people in business, government and education now use e-mail more frequently than
telephone to communicate with their colleagues.
 It is the process of searching messages electronically using your computer.
 Many organizations have e-mail facilities within their own local area networks, but do not have
Internet links.
 Usually e-mail is a part of your Internet connection and it is one of the most commonly used
Internet facilities.
Working of E-mail
 An electronic mailing system works in much the same manner as the poster service.
 In postal services elements of operation are mail boxes, post offices and letters in envelopes with
addresses on them. With e-mail you complete the same sort of operation sitting at your
computer.
 You will compose the message on your computer using e-mail package, you will address your
message by using simple commands from your e-mail screen.
  At the receiving end your message will be received by a mail server which is a computer set
aside for this function.
 The mail server acts like a post office for the person receiving the mail, the message is held there
ready for delivery.
 But instead of the postman taking it to the house or business location of that person, he or she
will collect it the next time they turn on the computer and look at their mailbox to see of there are
any new messages.
1. First type in a mail and then send it.
2. The message is sent to your Internet Service Provider’s mail server.
3. The mail server examines the address, deciding how to route the message.
4. The message travels over the Internet, arriving at the mail server of the recipient’s Internet
Service Provider, where it is held in an electronic mailbox.
5. To read the message, logs on to the mail server and retrieving any new messages waiting on
the server.
6. The message arrives onto the computer.
Advantages of E-mail
 Rapid delivery of messages almost anywhere in the world.
 It is very cheap to use, costing only a few seconds of phone time and possibly online charges,
whether you are sending it overseas or down the road.
 Send multiple copies to a group of people at the same time and as easily as you can send to a
single person.
 Incoming mail can be easily annotated and returned to its sender or forwarded to other people.
 Pictures, documents and other files can be attached to messages and easily detached and viewed
at the other end.
Disadvantages of E-mail
 E-mail does not always get through. The slightest error in the address is enough to prevent a
delivery and even when you do everything right, there is always the chance of failure in one of
the links between you and your recipient.
 Not everyone checks e-mail regularly.
 Junk, spam mails, etc.
 Viruses through attachments in mail.
E-mail Networks and Servers
 It consists of connecting networks permitting data to move freely among large numbers of
networks and populations.
 E-mail networking uses many types of connecting devices.
 These connecting devices help in the continuous and free flow of the data across the network.
 The connecting devices are:
1. Host
 This refers to a computer that facilitates communication with the other host computer
on a network.
 Individual users communicate with other host over a network using application
programs such as electronic mail and FTP.
 FTP stands for file transfer protocol and is a protocol which allows a user on one host
to access and transfer files between various hosts over a network.
2. Backbone
 It is backbone or fibre-optic cable running throughout the organization and all the
networks are then tied to this backbone.
 It needs high transmission rates to eliminate a potential bottleneck in inter-LAN
communication.
3. Repeater
 The electro-magnetic waves or the signals that travels through the network tend to
weaken over a distance.
  To check this weakening so that data could be transmitted smoothly over the large
distance, a device called repeater is used.
 It falls into two categories namely amplifiers and signal-regenerating devices.
 Amplifiers simply both the incoming signals and the noise.
 Signal-regenerating repeaters identify the signals admits the noise, reconstruct it and
pass only the desired information.
4. Bridge
 It connects two fundamentally identical networks.
 Unlike the repeaters, which simply pass on all the signals they receive, a bridge
selectively determines the appropriate segment that it should pass the signals.
 Bridge reads the address of all the signals receives.
 It reads the physical location of the source and the destination computer.
 Bridge filters the signals from one layer in the OSI model and delivers into the
corresponding layer of the destination computers.
5. Routers and Brouters
 Routers are devices that connect two or more networks.
 They are the combination of hardware and software.
 It uses logical and the physical addressing to connect two or more logically different
networks.
 Brouter is a router that can also act as a bridge.
 A brouter first tries to deliver the message or data in the form of small packets based
on network protocol information, i.e, it uses three layers physical, data-link and the
network layer.
 If the packets cannot be delivered based on the protocol information, it bridges the
packet using the physical and the logical address just like the routers.
 A brouter is a more affordable option of having both a router and a bridge.
6. Gateway
 It is a device that is used to connect totally dissimilar networks.
 Gateways actually perform protocol conversation for all seven layers of the OSI
model.
 Routers embedded with protocol conversation techniques are coming into picture like
IBM SNA.
 E-mail servers store and transfer messages on the network.
 It is just like the post offices of e-mail.
 The primary Internet e-mail protocol is called the Post Office Protocol (POP).
 The role of the e-mail server is to convert the message contents and attachments between
different e-mail systems.
 Your network is using MHS (Message Handling Services), which is a Novell Netware e-mail
protocol and you want to receive mail from the Internet, which uses SMTP.
 Conversation of these messages from different e-mail systems is done by the gateway.
 It is usually a dedicated computer, although it can be a program is run on the network server.
E-mail Protocols
 There is a complexity involved in having different systems send and receive messages in many
different formats, e-mail protocols have become necessary.
 The Internet Protocol suite is unique in that it is made up of non-proprietary protocols.
 This means that they do not belong any one company and that the technology is available to
anyone who wishes to use it.
 As a result, the Internet Protocol suite is supported by the widest variety of vendors.
 Some of the e-mail protocols are:
1. SMTP (Simple Mail Transfer Protocol)
 It is a TCP/IP protocol that specifies how computers exchange mails.
  SMTP works in conjunction with POP which is the reason that Internet e-mail
functions so well.
 SMTP is used to upload mail directly from the client to an Internet Service Provider’s
computer server.
 This can only be achieved when the connection to Internet is constantly maintained.
 SMTP is a simple ASCII protocol.
 After establishing the TCP connection, the client software connects to a piece of
software called SMTP server.
 The server acknowledges that it has been contacted, and the client tells the server that
it has a message to be delivered to a certain address.
 The SMTP server replies with a message saying either ‘Send it now’ or ‘Too busy:
send : later’.
 The problems that may arise with SMTP protocol are as follows:
1. Some older version of SMTP protocol cannot handle messages exceeding 64 kb.
2. If the client and server have different timeouts, one of them will loose connection
while the other will still be connected, resulting in unexpectedly terminating the
connection.
2. POP3 (Post Office Protocol)
 It is the protocol used to check any non-web based e-mail account.
 POP was designed to support ‘offline’ mail processing.
 In offline the mail is delivered to a server, and a personal computer user periodically
invokes a mail client program that connects to the server and downloads all of the
pending mail to the user’s own machine.
 Once delivered to the PC the messages are then deleted from the mail server.
Advantages:
1. Your messages are downloaded to your local computer all at once, thereby
making offline reading easier.
2. You can specify whether to keep copies of the messages on the server.
Disadvantages:
1. You must synchronize your local inbox with your server’s mailbox.
2. This can result in downloading a new message over and over each time you
connect.
3. If you use more than one computer, messages might reside on one or the other,
but not on both.
4. You can’t access all mail folders from multiple locations.
3. IMAP4 (Internet Message Access Protocol)
 IMAP is a protocol for retrieving e-mail messages.
 The latest version IMAP4, is similar to POP3 but supports some additional features.
 With IMAP4 you can search through your e-mail messages for keyboards while the
messages are still on mail server.
 You can then choose which messages to download to your machine.
 E-mail stored on an IMAP server can be manipulated from a desktop computer at
home, a workstation at the office and a notebook computer while travelling, without
the need to transfer messages or files back and forth between these computers.
Advantages:
1. Your messages and any changes to them stay on your server, saying local disk
space.
2. You always have access to an updated mailbox, and you can get your mail from
multiple locations.
3. Performance on a modem is faster, since you initially download message holders
only and you can synchronize specific mail folders for offline use.
Disadvantage:
1. Not all ISPs support IMAP.
4. MIME6 (Multipurpose Internet Mail Extensions)
  It is a standard for describing different types of information.
 MIME does not change SMTP or replace it.
 Instead MIME is used to specify encoding for different types of different types of
information into text, making it possible to send them as e-mail message.
 It is also used in other types of communication where there is a need for specifying
which type of information is used.
 MIME information resides in the mail header – the MIME header lines specify the
version of MIME used, the type of the data being sent and the encoding used to
convert the data to ASCII.
For Example
From : ruth@indiatimes.com
To : susan@email.com
MIME version : 6.0
Content – type : image/gif
Content-Transfer-Encoding : base64
 The header line MIME version declares that the message was composed using version
6.0 of the MIME protocol.
 The content type declaration specifies that the data is a GIF image and the content-
Transfer-Encoding header declares that base64encoding was used to convert the image
to ACII.
 To view the image, a receiver’s mail system must first convert from base64 encoding
back to binary and then run an application that displays a GIF image on the user
screen.
 The MIME standard specifies that a content-type and a subtype is separated by a slash.
 In the example above, image is the content type, and GIF is the subtype.
Content Type Used When Data In the Message Is
Text Textual
Image A still photograph or computer-generated
image
Audio A sound recording
Video A video recording that includes motion
Application Raw data for a program
Multipart Multiple messages that each have a
separate content type and encoding
Message An entire e-mail message

5. Unix-to-Unix Copy (UUCP)

 This was initially a program that was run under the Unix Operating System that
allowed one Unix system to send files to another Unix system via a telephone line.
 It is commonly used to describe the large international network, which uses the
UUCP protocol to pass news and electronic mail through USENET.
 One of the main disadvantages of UUCP networks is their low bandwith.
 There are two reasons that make its bandwith low; one as the telephone lines has a
fixed transfer rate and the other that UUCP links are rarely permanent connection,
host need to dial up each other at regular intervals.
Structure of an E-mail
 A mail consists of a header, which contains information from whom the message was sent, the
recipients and the route.
 Many of the header fields are not shown by default, but most programs used to read e-mail allow
full headers to be displayed.
 This is then followed by the body of the message which contains whatever the sender wishes.
 E-mail has three main parts: header, body, and signature
 The first two parts, the header and the body of the message, are essential and the third part, the
signature is optional.