As you can probably guess, when it comes to the field of
web application development, all discussions of the GUI
begin with the
web browser.
At its core, a web browser is a software program that knows how to
contact a web server (using the
HTTP
protocol), request a given
document from that web server, and display that document returned
by the server to a human user.
Because the communication between the browser and server is
better discussed as a function of the communication layer,
we'll discuss it in the next section. For now, we concern
ourselves mainly with the document display that is
more classically a GUI Layer issue.
Typically, the document that is returned from the web server
is formatted (according to some formatting instructions)
by the browser so that when it is
displayed, the document will look pretty (rather than just being
displayed as plain text) or have some special functionality. All
readers will certainly be familiar with
HTML, the most ubiquitous
web-formatting languages around today.
Most web browsers know how to take HTML-encoded text and display
it according to the HTML formatting instructions. Thus, a web
browser will take <CENTER><B>Hello
Cyberspace</B></CENTER> and turn
it into
Hello Cyberspace
.
NOTE: Of course, it is important to note that though the browser
is indeed responsible for creating this framework for
communication between the world of computers and the world of
people, it is often the web application developer who must do
the grunt work of translating actual bits of content between
parties.
That is, the web browser's primary task is to provide a
communication framework upon which a web application developer
can build. In other words, though the browser knows how to get
HTML pages from a web server and display them, it is the
responsibility of the web application developer to design a
well-navigable site with interesting and useful
content.
![[Web Browser at Work]](web_diagram.gif)
