website

Website www.yahoo.com 2005

website

A website, Web site or WWW site (often shortened to just site) is a collection of webpages, that is, HTML or XHTML documents accessible via HTTP on the Internet; all publicly accessible websites in existence comprise the World Wide Web . The pages of a website will be accessed from a common root URL, the homepage, and usually reside on the same physical server. The URLs of the pages organize them into a hierarchy, although the hyperlinks between them control how the reader perceives the overall structure and how the traffic flows between the different parts of the site.

A website will often be the work of a single individual, a business or organization, or dedicated to a particular topic or purpose. This is quite a blurry definition, given the hypertext nature of the web: the whole of Wikipedia forms a website, but whether the Meta- Wikipedia pages are part of the same website or a sister website is open to debate.

Web sites are written in, or dynamically converted to HTML (Hyper Text Markup Language) and are accessed using software called a web browser . Websites consist of static HTML pages or pages that are created dynamically using technologies such as Active Server Pages (ASP), or Java Server Pages (JSP). A website also requires software known as an HTTP Server, such as Apache ((Extern link: http://www.apache.org), the most commonly used web server software used on the Internet, or Microsoft's Internet Information Server (IIS). Often websites will also consist of content stored in one or more databases.

Plugins are also available for browsers which allow them to show active content, such as Flash, Shockwave or applets written in Java. Dynamic HTML also provides for user interactivity and realtime element updating within webpages (i.e., pages don't have to be loaded or reloaded to effect any changes), mainly using the DOM and JavaScript, support for which is built-in for most modern browsers.

The text above is licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License (GNU FDL).
It uses material from the Wikipedia article "website".