Wilde's WWW

Erik Wilde

Springer-Verlag, 600 pages, ISBN 3-540-64285-4, November 1998, Hardcover

The most important recent development in the world of media is definitely the World Wide Web. Since its beginnings in 1989, the "Web" has evolved from a rather simple model of resource names, a transfer protocol, and a language for the description of interconnected multimedia documents, into a highly complex infrastructure.

This book gives thorough up to the minute descriptions of all relevant WWW developments. It includes the latest versions of the transfer protocol (HTTP/1.1) and description languages (HTML 4.0, SGML, and its upcoming variant XML); style sheets (CSS); server issues such as SSL and CGI; Apache as an example of a Web server; and a description of technologies that will be of considerable importance in the future, such as MathML, VRML, and PNG. The various techniques how dynamic documents can be created using DHTML are also discussed.

The reader is provided with a detailed overview of the most important technologies of the Web, with special emphasis on the way they interrelate with each other. With its clear structure, this book can also be used as a reference work for anyone who works with the different concepts that make up the complex infrastructure of today's World Wide Web.

If you want to order the book, you can go to

amazon.com's web page for the book,
amazon.de's web page for the book,
barnesandnoble.com's web page for the book, or
Springer-Verlag's web page for the book.

It is planned to publish a second and completely revised and extended version of the book in 2002 (in fact, I am already working on it part-time, but there still is a lot of work to do until this work in progress becomes a finalized book again). Your comments, suggestions, criticisms, additions and whatever else you can think of for the second edition are very welcome.

Some sections are available online. These sections can be read to get an impression of the book's writing style, and of the level of expertise required for reading the book.

Foreword
Preface
List of Figures
List of Tables
Introduction
1. Fundamentals
- 1.1 Document models
  - 1.1.1 Multimedia
  - 1.1.2 Hypermedia
  - 1.1.3 Distribution
- 1.2 Web history
  - 1.2.1 Organizational history
  - 1.2.2 Technical history
- 1.3 Terminology
- 1.4 The Internet
  - 1.4.1 The Internet environment
  - 1.4.2 Transferring data
  - 1.4.3 Data types

Part I - Basics

2. Universal Resource Identifier (URI)
- 2.1 The need for resource identification
  - 2.1.1 Web identifiers from a user perspective
  - 2.1.2 The design of web identifiers
- 2.2 URI syntax
- 2.3 URI semantics
  - 2.3.1 Uniform Resource Name (URN)
  - 2.3.2 Uniform Resource Locator (URL)
- 2.4 The future of URI
3. Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP)
- 3.1 History
  - 3.1.1 HTTP/0.9
  - 3.1.2 HTTP/1.0
  - 3.1.3 HTTP/1.1
- 3.2 Hypertext Transfer Protocol 1.1 (HTTP/1.1)
  - 3.2.1 Messages
  - 3.2.2 General and entity headers
  - 3.2.3 Request
  - 3.2.4 Response
  - 3.2.5 Content negotiation
  - 3.2.6 Authentication
  - 3.2.7 Persistent connections
  - 3.2.8 Chunked encoding
  - 3.2.9 Caching
- 3.3 Security
  - 3.3.1 HTTP over SSL (HTTPS)
  - 3.3.2 Secure HTTP (S-HTTP)
- 3.4 Cookies
- 3.5 Usage of HTTP
- 3.6 Non-standard HTTP extensions
  - 3.6.1 Refreshing web pages
  - 3.6.2 Interpage transitions
- 3.7 The future of HTTP
  - 3.7.1 Protocol Extension Protocol (PEP)
  - 3.7.2 HTTP next generation (HTTP-ng)
  - 3.7.3 Multiplexing Protocol (SMUX)
4. Standard Generalized Markup Language (SGML)
- 4.1 SGML concepts
  - 4.1.1 Content and presentation
  - 4.1.2 Using markup for structuring
  - 4.1.3 Document classes
  - 4.1.4 The presentation of content
- 4.2 The SGML standard
  - 4.2.1 SGML declaration
  - 4.2.2 Document Type Definition (DTD)
  - 4.2.3 SGML documents
- 4.3 Usage of SGML
  - 4.3.1 SGML profiles
  - 4.3.2 SGML applications
  - 4.3.3 SGML validation
- 4.4 The future of SGML
5. Hypertext Markup Language (HTML)
- 5.1 History
  - 5.1.1 Early versions
  - 5.1.2 HTML 2.0
  - 5.1.3 HTML 3.2
  - 5.1.4 HTML 4.0
- 5.2 Hypertext Markup Language 4.0 (HTML 4.0)
  - 5.2.1 HTML 4.0 DTDs
  - 5.2.2 Common attributes
  - 5.2.3 Basic structure of an HTML document
  - 5.2.4 Simple and structured text
  - 5.2.5 Images and image maps
  - 5.2.6 Links
  - 5.2.7 Frames and forms
  - 5.2.8 Dynamic documents
- 5.3 Publishing with HTML
- 5.4 Usage of HTML
- 5.5 The future of HTML

Part II - Advanced

6. Cascading Style Sheets (CSS)
- 6.1 Principles of CSS
- 6.2 History
- 6.3 Cascading Style Sheets, level 1 (CSS1)
  - 6.3.1 Inheritance
  - 6.3.2 Selectors
  - 6.3.3 Units
  - 6.3.4 Declarations
  - 6.3.5 Using multiple style sheets
- 6.4 Related approaches
- 6.5 Converting to CSS
- 6.6 The future of CSS
  - 6.6.1 Cascading Style Sheets Positioning (CSS-P)
  - 6.6.2 Cascading Style Sheets, level 2 (CSS2)
7. Extensible Markup Language (XML)
- 7.1 Principles of XML
  - 7.1.1 Creating document types
  - 7.1.2 Formatting of XML documents
  - 7.1.3 Conversion
- 7.2 Extensible Markup Language 1.0 (XML 1.0)
  - 7.2.1 Differences to SGML
- 7.3 XML Linking Language (XLink)
  - 7.3.1 Linking concepts
  - 7.3.2 Link information
  - 7.3.3 Link types
  - 7.3.4 Attributes
- 7.4 XML Pointer Language (XPointer)
  - 7.4.1 Concepts
  - 7.4.2 Location terms
  - 7.4.3 Spanning locators
  - 7.4.4 Persistence
- 7.5 Extensible Style Language (XSL)
  - 7.5.1 Concepts
  - 7.6.1 Style sheets
- 7.6 XML and other markup languages
  - 7.6.1 Comparison of XML and HTML
  - 7.6.2 Comparison of XML and SGML
- 7.7 The future of XML
8. Scripting and Programming
- 8.1 Scripting languages
  - 8.1.1 ECMAScript
  - 8.1.2 VBScript
- 8.2 Programming languages
  - 8.2.1 Java
- 8.3 Distributed programming
  - 8.3.1 Remote Method Invocation (RMI)
  - 8.3.2 Common Object Request Broker Architecture (CORBA)
  - 8.3.3 Distributed Component Object Model (DCOM)
  - 8.3.4 Interworking
9. HTTP Servers
- 9.1 Server performance
- 9.2 Server configuration
  - 9.2.1 Server start
  - 9.2.2 Virtual hosts
  - 9.2.3 Origin servers
  - 9.2.4 Proxies
- 9.3 The Apache HTTP server
  - 9.3.1 Installation
  - 9.3.2 Configuration
- 9.4 Common Gateway Interface (CGI)
  - 9.4.1 Communication with the server
  - 9.4.2 Forms and CGI
  - 9.4.3 Server-Side Includes (SSI)
10. Miscellaneous
- 10.1 Server-side technologies
  - 10.1.1 FastCGI
  - 10.1.2 Java servlets
- 10.2 Browsers
  - 10.2.1 Integration
  - 10.2.2 Prefetching
- 10.3 Search engines
- 10.4 New content types
  - 10.4.1 Virtual Reality Modeling Language (VRML)
  - 10.4.2 Mathematical Markup Language (MathML)
  - 10.4.3 Portable Network Graphics (PNG)
  - 10.4.4 Vector graphics
  - 10.4.5 RealMedia Architecture (RMA)
- 10.5 New architectural components
  - 10.5.1 Platform for Internet Content Selection (PICS)
  - 10.5.2 Digital Signature Initiative (DSig)
  - 10.5.3 Resource Description Framework (RDF)
  - 10.5.4 Dynamic fonts
  - 10.5.5 Document Object Model (DOM)
  - 10.5.6 Synchronized Multimedia Integration Language (SMIL)
11. Related Technology
- 11.1 Electronic mail
  - 11.1.1 Sending electronic mail
  - 11.1.2 Receiving electronic mail
- 11.2 Directory services
  - 11.2.1 Directory Access Protocol (DAP)
  - 11.2.2 Lightweight Directory Access Protocol (LDAP)
- 11.3 Usenet news
  - 11.3.1 Network News Transfer Protocol (NNTP)

Part III - Appendices

A. HTTP/1.1 Definitions
- A.1 Messages
  - A.1.1 General definitions
  - A.1.2 Request
  - A.1.3 Response
- A.2 Status codes
  - A.2.1 Informational (1xx)
  - A.2.2 Successful (2xx)
  - A.2.3 Redirection (3xx)
  - A.2.4 Client error (4xx)
  - A.2.5 Server error (5xx)
- A.3 Warn codes
  - A.3.1 Temporary warnings (1xx)
  - A.3.2 Persistent warnings (2xx)
B. HTML 4.0 Definitions
- B.1 SGML declaration
- B.2 DTD Entities
- B.3 HTML 4.0 table DTD
- B.4 HTML 4.0 form DTD
C. XML 1.0 Definitions
- C.1 SGML declaration
- C.2 XML DTD for SMIL
References
Glossary
Index