Believe or not, there was a time when web browsers did not exist. In those dark and cruel times, you accessed data on the Internet through the typing of cryptic commands in UNIX. Usually you had to know what you were trying to get in order to get anything useful. There were some crude search tools (gopher, ARCHIE, VERNONICA) but overall, the Internet was a dark and foul place, full of foreboding, the domain of academics and other cruel denizens. It was a text only world made more grim by the glowing green text monitors that were the standard in those evil days.
The goal of developing HTML was to develop a cross-platform language, meaning that it was independent of the operating system or hardware. An HTML document would look the same whether it was viewed on an IBM, Mac, or Unix machine.
An important consideration of the design process was efficiency. HTML was designed to be a text based language that would transfer very quickly over the Internet. The "meaning" of the formatting is derived by the browser, on the client machine, through the interpretation of HTML tags. The tags are what tell the browser what do do as it displays the text, such as make things bold, italic,
start a new paragraph, etc. Just for fun, take a break and do this:
Click on View.
Click on Source
You should see my page with all the formatting codes embedded throughout the document. That's what we are studying!
In addition to the HTML code that is received from the server, wherever that might be, the client machine (the one you are using) needs to have access to the Internet. This is usually done through an ISP or Internet Service Provider. The ISP usually provides two functions. The first is as the conduit or pathway to and from the Internet. The second is as a Web Host Server, or the place where you store your web pages for use by other people. In some cases, a company might have a mini-Internet or Intranet. This is a network running identical software that you see on the Internet, but the audience is limited in some manner to just those individuals within the company. This is important because the network configuration determines where you need to store your files. It does no good to have a web page on your own PC if nobody else in the world can access it, right? So we move public web pages to a Web Host Server which has a published address which allows the audience to access you work of art. Whether you are accessing the Web pages via a Wide Area Network (WAN) such as the Internet or via a Local Area Network (LAN), the relationship between the browser and the HTML code remains unchanged.