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DocsRoxenWebServer 4.0Web Developer ManualBasic Concepts
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URL
HTTP
XML

Basic Concepts

In this chapter you'll find an overview of the concepts and standards that web servers in general and Roxen WebServer and RXML in particular are built upon. These are only provided as a short introduction and background information to what follows in this manual.

We will take a look at three main topics, URLs, HTTP and XML. URLs are used to point out and locate a resource on the Internet. HTTP is used to retrieve that resource and interact with the webserver, and XML is used as the basis for describing resources. The URL section will introduce http/https/ftp URLs and outline the differences between absolute URLs, relative URLs and absolute path URLs. The HTTP section will discuss the stateless properties of the HTTP protocol and explain how this affects HTTP authentication and the need for cookies. It then ends by quickly mention the role of MIME types. Finally the XML section introduces the XML syntax and outlines the XML application XHTML. There is no mention of HTML, since those who do not know HTML are better off learning XHTML, and those who do know HTML have no problems applying XML restrictions on HTML to get XHTML.