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.
