WEB ARCHITECTURE

Web Architecture focuses on the foundation technologies and principles which sustain the Web, including URIs and HTTP.

Architecture Principles 

Web Architecture principles help to design technologies by providing guidance and articulating the issues around some specific choices.

Identifiers 

We share things by their names. URL, URI, IRI is the way to name things on the Web and manipulate them. Some additional addressing needs in the Web Services stack motivated some additional layers.

Protocols 

Protocols are the vehicle for exchanging our ideas. HTTP is the core protocol of the Web. W3C is also working on XML Protocols and SOAP in relation to Web Services.

Meta Formats 

XML, the Extensible Markup Language, is used to build new formats at low cost (due to widely available tools to manipulate content in those new formats). RDF and OWL allow people to define vocabularies (“ontologies”) of terms as part of the Semantic Web.

Protocol and Meta Format Considerations 

Documents on the Web are loosely joined pieces by identifiers. It creates a maze of rich interactions between protocols and formats.

Internationalization 

W3C has worked with the community on the internationalization of identifiers (IRIs) and a general character model for the Web.