Web browser

Read the following words and word combinations and use them for understanding and translation of the text:

to resolve to – принимать решение

relevant – относящийся к делу

requested - предлагаемый, запрашиваемый

cache - кэш, тайныйзапас

to achieve - достигать

to be available for - доступный для

attractive - привлекательный

to reduce - сокращать

fray - схватка, битва

to be inferior to - уступать, быть хуже (ниже) по сравнению с

sufficiently - достаточно

to bundle - связывать в узел, отсылать

to fetch - извлекать, вызывать

various - разнообразный

controversial - противоречивый

to embed - встроить, внедрить.

by default - по умолчанию

layout – планирование, разметка.

to intertwine with – переплетаться с…

triggered by - приводимый в действие

to quit –уходить, покидать

flagship - флагман

to ruin - разорять

litigation - судебное дело

The World Wide Web consists of millions of sites that provide hyper-text documents that can include not only text but still images, video, and sound. To access these pages, the user runs a Web-browsing program. The basic function of a Web browser is to request a page by specifying its address (URL, uniform [or universal] resource locator). This request resolves to a request (HTTP, HyperText Transport Protocol) that is processed by the relevant Web server. The server sends the HTML document to the browser, which then displays it for the user. Typically, the browser stores recently requested documents and files in a local cache on the user’s PCs. Use of the cache reduces the amount of data that must be resent over the Internet. However, sufficiently skilled snoopers can examine the cache to find details of a user’s recent Web surfing. (Caching is also used by Internet Service Providers so they can provide frequently requested pages from their own server rather than having to fetch them from the hosting sites.)

When the Web was first created in the early 1990s it consisted only of text pages, although there were a few experimental graphical Web extensions developed by various researchers. The first graphical Web browser to achieve widespread use was Mosaic created by Marc Andreessen, developed at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA). By 1993, Mosaic was available for free download and had become the browser of choice for PC users. Andreessen left NCSA in 1994 to found Netscape Corporation. The Netscape Navigator browser improved Mosaic in several ways, making the graphics faster and more attractive. Netscape included a facility called Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) for carrying out encrypted commercial transactions on-line. Microsoft, which had been a latecomer to the Internet boom, entered the fray with its Microsoft Internet Explorer. At first the program was inferior to Netscape, but it was steadily improved. Aided by Microsoft’s controversial tactic of bundling the free browser starting with Windows 95, Internet Explorer has taken over the leading browser position.

A Web browser such as Microsoft Internet Explorer or Firefox makes it easy to find and move between linked Web pages. Browser users can record or “bookmark” favorite pages. Browser plug-ins provide support for services such as streaming video and audio.

Web browsers communicate with web servers primarily using HTTP (Hyper-text Transfer Protocol) to fetch web pages. HTTP allows web browsers to submit information to web servers as well as fetch web pages from them. As of writing, the most commonly used HTTP is HTTP/1.1, which is fully defined in RFC 2616. HTTP/1.1 has its own required standards which Internet Explorer does not fully support, but most other current-generation web browsers do.

Pages are located by means of a URL (Uniform Resource Locator), which is treated as an address, beginning with http: for HTTP access. Many browsers also support a variety of other URL types and their corresponding protocols, such as ftp: for FTP (file transfer protocol), gopher: for Gopher, and https: for HTTPS (an SSL encrypted version of HTTP).

The file format for a web page is usually HTML (hyper-text markup language) and is identified in the HTTP protocol using a MIME content type. Most browsers support a variety of formats in addition to HTML, such as the JPEG, PNG and GIF image formats, and can be extended to support more through the use of plug-ins. The combination of HTTP content type and URL protocol specification allows web page designers to embed images, animations, video, sound, and streaming media into a web page, or to make them accessible through the web page.

Early web browsers supported only a very simple version of HTML. The rapid development of proprietary web browsers led to the development of non-standard dialects of HTML, leading to problems with Web interoperability. Modern web browsers (Mozilla, Opera, and Safari) support standards-based HTML and XHTML (starting with HTML 4.01), which should display in the same way across all browsers. Internet Explorer does not fully support XHTML 1.0 or 1.1 yet. Currently many sites are designed using WYSIWYG HTML generation programs such as Macromedia Dreamweaver or Microsoft Frontpage. These often generate non-standard HTML by default, hindering the work of the W3C in developing standards, specifically with XHTML and CSS (cascading style sheets, used for page layout).

Some of the more popular browsers include additional components to support Usenet news, IRC (Internet relay chat), and e-mail. Protocols supported may include NNTP (network news transfer protocol), SmTP (Simple mail Transfer Protocol), IMAP (Internet Message Access Protocol), and POP (Post Office Protocol).