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What Does Web Browser Mean? A web browser is a software program that allows a user to locate, access, and display web pages. Web browsers are used primarily for displaying and accessing websites on the internet, as well as other content created using languages such as Hypertext Markup Language (HTML) and Extensible Markup Language (XML). Browsers translate web pages and websites delivered using Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP) into human-readable content. They also have the ability to display other protocols and prefixes, such as secure HTTP (HTTPS), File Transfer Protocol (FTP), email handling (mailto:), and files (file:). In addition, most browsers also support external plug-ins required to display active content, such as in-page video, audio and game content. Early web browsers started prior to the beginning of the 21st century, with a text-only browser called Lynx and another browser called Mosaic. Since then, Google Chrome has also become a contender in the browser wars - the competition to power the bulk of end user activity.
What Does a Web Browser Do? Essentially, a web browser handles HTTP activity between a client and a server that is the backbone of World Wide Web use. URLs are traffic directions for the web browser, and the browser uses IP addresses and other tools to establish these connections. Along with facilitating web surfing, new types of web browsers have additional functionality through a range of plug-ins that can add features after the fact. Some of these have to do with security and accessibility, while others have to do with end user conveniences or data aggregation. Some of the biggest new developments in web browsers have to do with cybersecurity. For instance, Google Chrome has been a pioneer in hardening it systems against sites that do not have a valid SSL certificate, which prevents various kinds of hacking and vulnerabilities. Web browsers can also be made to handle newer protocols like some of those created by the Internet Engineering Task Force to augment web security. Other new technologies include the idea of browser isolation, where companies direct activity in a segmented way, separating internal network activity from web browser activity. When the browser activity can be placed outside of a firewall, and monitored while incoming, the internal network can enjoy greater protections. Meanwhile, the underlying web coding languages that are used have also evolved. HTML has become HTML 5, and cascading style sheets or CSS have revolutionized the ways that consistent site design is maintained.
Copyright © 2010 W3C® (MIT, ERCIM, Keio), All Rights Reserved. W3C liability, trademark and document use rules apply. This specification defines an API for storing data in databases that can be queried using a variant of SQL. Beware. This specification is no longer in active maintenance and the Web Applications Working Group does not intend to maintain it further. This section describes the status of this document at the time of its publication. Other documents may supersede this document. This document is the 18 November 2010 Working Group Note of Web SQL Database. Publication as a Working Group Note does not imply endorsement by the W3C Membership. This is a draft document and may be updated, replaced or obsoleted by other documents at any time. It is inappropriate to cite this document as other than work in progress. The W3C Web Applications Working Group is the W3C working group responsible for this document.
This document was on the W3C Recommendation track but specification work has stopped. The specification reached an impasse: all interested implementors have used the same SQL backend (Sqlite), but we need multiple independent implementations to proceed along a standardisation path. The Web Applications Working Group continues work on two other storage-related specifications: Web Storage and Indexed Database API. Implementors should be aware that this specification is not stable. Implementors who are not taking part in the discussions are likely to find the specification changing out from under them in incompatible ways. Vendors interested in implementing this specification should join the aforementioned mailing lists and take part in the discussions. All feedback is welcome. The latest stable version of the editor's draft of this specification is always available on the W3C CVS server. This specification is automatically generated from the corresponding section in the HTML5 specification's source document, as hosted in the WHATWG Subversion repository.
This document was produced by a group operating under the 5 February 2004 W3C Patent Policy. W3C maintains a public list of any patent disclosures made in connection with the deliverables of the group; that page also includes instructions for disclosing a patent. First, a function prepareDatabase() is defined. This function returns a handle to the database, first creating the database if necessary. Sometimes, there might be an arbitrary number of variables to substitute in. All diagrams, examples, and notes in this specification are non-normative, as are all sections explicitly marked non-normative. Everything else in this specification is normative.The key words "MUST", "MUST NOT", "REQUIRED", "SHOULD", "SHOULD NOT", "RECOMMENDED", "MAY", and "OPTIONAL" in the normative parts of this document are to be interpreted as described in RFC2119. For readability, these words do not appear in all uppercase letters in this specification. Requirements phrased in the imperative as part of algorithms (such as "strip any leading space characters" or "return false and abort these steps") are to be interpreted with the meaning of the key word ("must", "should", "may", etc) used in introducing the algorithm.Some conformance requirements are phrased as requirements on attributes, methods or objects.
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