HTTP for HTML Authors, Part I
Up until now, the HTML documents and the CSS style sheets we've created together throughout the tutorials have existed in a vacuum. If you've been following the tutorials closely, you're probably creating these documents using a text editor or HTML authoring tool and storing them on your hard disk. Now this is all fine if all you want to do is write HTML documents and spend your evenings admiring them, but unless I've hugely misjudged my audience I assume that most of you want to learn HTML and write documents in HTML in order to publish them as Web pages.
In this lesson, you'll learn the basics about how to publish a document on the Web, and how your readers can access it. This is all accomplished through something called HTTP, the HyperText Transfer Protocol. I'll be skipping a lot of the details of this process as most of it is not of direct interest to most Web authors. However, creating Web pages while being ignorant of HTTP is like trying to be an author and not knowing anything about the publishing industry. You could make it, but you'd either have to very, very lucky or have a really good agent. So unless you can find someone to take 10% of your earnings in exchange for handling the server side of things, you'd better read on.