Page 128 - Electronic Commerce

Technology Infrastructure: The Internet and the World Wide Web

Summary

In this chapter, you learned about the history of the Internet and the Web, including how these 103
technologies emerged from research projects and grew to be the supporting infrastructure for
electronic commerce today. You learned about intranets and extranets and that they can be
implemented using public network, private network, or virtual private network technologies. You
also learned about the wide variety of devices that can be connected to the Internet today,
including the Internet of Things.
The Internet and the Web have grown rapidly, and you have learned some of the reasons
for that growth, which has been largely continual despite ups and downs in the general econ-
omy. You learned about the size of the Web, including the hidden resources of the Deep Web.
You also learned about the protocols, programs, languages, and architectures that support
the Internet and the World Wide Web. TCP/IP is the protocol suite used to create and transport
information packets across the Internet. IP addresses identify computers on the Internet. Domain
names such as www.amazon.com also identify computers on the Internet, but those names are
translated into IP addresses by the routing computers on the Internet. You learned about the
transition from IPv4 to IPv6 and that HTTP is the set of rules for transferring Web pages and
requests for those Web pages on the Internet. POP, SMTP, and IMAP are protocols that help
manage e-mail.
Hypertext Markup Language (HTML) was derived from the more generic meta language
SGML. HTML defines the structure and content of Web pages using markup symbols called
tags. Over time, HTML has evolved to include a large number of tags that accommodate graph-
ics and other Web page elements. Hyperlinks are HTML tags that contain a URL. The URL
can be a local or remote computer. HTML editors facilitate Web page construction with helpful
tools and drag-and-drop capabilities. Extensible Markup Language (XML) is also derived from
SGML. However, unlike HTML, XML uses markup tags to describe the meaning, or semantics,
of the text, rather than its display characteristics. XML offers businesses hope for a common
language that they will be able to use to describe products, services, and even business pro-
cesses to each other in common, shared databases. XML could help companies dramatically
reduce the costs of handling intercompany information flows. You learned that one of the most
successful implementations of XML to date has been XBRL, which provides a standard for
reporting financial information to regulators and investors.
Internet service providers offer many different types of connections to the Internet. Basic
telephone connections are the most economical and easiest to install, but they are the slowest.
Broadband cable, satellite microwave transmission, and DSL services provide Internet access at
relatively high speeds. Other, more expensive options such as leased lines provide the band-
width that larger businesses need. A variety of wireless connection options are becoming avail-
able, including fixed-point wireless options such as Bluetooth, Wi-Fi, and ZigBee. The wireless
connection options available through mobile phones show promise in creating new opportunities
for revenue generation, cost reduction, and payment-processing applications.
Internet2 is an experimental network built by a consortium of research universities and
businesses that provides a test bed for creating and perfecting the high-speed networking tech-
nologies of tomorrow. The Semantic Web project is moving slowly toward its goal of making
research data widely available and enabling many user interactions with the Web to be handled
by intelligent software agents.

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