Resources - jude-lindale/Wiki GitHub Wiki

Web servers host web resources . A web resource is the source of web content. The simplest kind of web resource is a static file on the web server’s filesystem. These files can contain anything: they might be text files, HTML files, Microsoft Word files, Adobe Acrobat files, JPEG image files, AVI movie files, or any other format you can think of.

resources don’t have to be static files. Resources can also be software programs that generate content on demand. These dynamic content resources can generate content based on your identity, on what information you’ve requested, or on the time of day.

A resource is any kind of content source. A file containing your company’s sales forecast spreadsheet is a resource. A web gateway to scan your local public library’s shelves is a resource. An Internet search engine is a resource.

Media Types

Because the Internet hosts many thousands of different data types, HTTP carefully tags each object being transported through the Web with a data format label called a MIME type. MIME (Multipurpose Internet Mail Extensions) was originally designed to solve problems encountered in moving messages between different electronic mail systems. MIME worked so well for email that HTTP adopted it to describe and label its own multimedia content.

Web servers attach a MIME type to all HTTP object data. When a web browser gets an object back from a server, it looks at the associated MIME type to see if it knows how to handle the object. Most browsers can handle hundreds of popular object types: displaying image files, parsing and formatting HTML files, playing audio files through the computer’s speakers, or launching external plug-in software to handle special formats.

A MIME type is a textual label, represented as a primary object type and a specific subtype, separated by a slash. For example:

  • An HTML-formatted text document would be labeled with type text/html.

  • A plain ASCII text document would be labeled with type text/plain.

  • A JPEG version of an image would be image/jpeg.

  • A GIF-format image would be image/gif.

  • An Apple QuickTime movie would be video/quicktime.

  • A Microsoft PowerPoint presentation would be application/vnd.ms-powerpoint.

URIs

Each web server resource has a name, so clients can point out what resources they are interested in. The server resource name is called a uniform resource identifier , or URI. URIsare like the postal addresses of the Internet, uniquely identifying and locating information resources around the world.

The image below shows how the URI specifies the HTTP protocol to access the saw-blade GIF resource on Joe’s store’s server. Given the URI, HTTP can retrieve the object. URIs come in two flavors, called URLs and URNs. Let’s take a peek at each of these types of resource identifiers now.

URLs

The uniform resource locator (URL) is the most common form of resource identifier. URLs describe the specific location of a resource on a particular server. They tell you exactly how to fetch a resource from a precise, fixed location.

Most URLs follow a standardized format of three main parts:

  • The first part of the URL is called the scheme , and it describes the protocol used to access the resource. This is usually the HTTP protocol (http:// ).

  • The second part gives the server Internet address (e.g., www.joes-hardware.com).

  • The rest names a resource on the web server (e.g., /specials/saw-blade.gif ).

URNs

The second flavor of URI is the uniform resource name, or URN. A URN serves as a unique name for a particular piece of content, independent of where the resource currently resides. These location-independent URNs allow resources to move from place to place. URNs also allow resources to be accessed by multiple network access protocols while maintaining the same name.

For example, the following URN might be used to name the Internet standards document “RFC 2141” regardless of where it resides (it may even be copied in several places):

urn:ietf:rfc:2141 URNs are still experimental and not yet widely adopted. To work effectively, URNs need a supporting infrastructure to resolve resource locations; the lack of such an infrastructure has also slowed their adoption. But URNs do hold some exciting promise for the future.

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