Apache Related Links:

• W3C who maintain W3 standards development
• Apache project page

HTTP is the protocol for transfering Web pages. Current version is 1.1, which is now an RFC on the standards track. It replaces the widely implemented 1.0.

Note: this is not related to Apache version numbers!

• HTTP 0.9 (of historical interest only)
• HTTP 1.0 [RFC1945] (or in HTML PS format)
• HTTP 1.1 [RFC2616]
• Use and interpretation of HTTP version numbers [RFC2145]
• Basic and Digest Access Authentication [RFC2617]
• PEP: an Extension Mechanism for HTTP [Internet Draft]
• Transparent Content Negotiation [RFC2295] and Remote Variant Selection Algorithm 1.0 [RFC2296]
• See also: other HTTP Internet drafts, the W3C HTTP specifications

Uniform Resource Identifiers or Names (URI, URN) are the generic names for Uniform Resource Locators (URLs), used to identify resources on the WWW and Internet.

• Uniform Resource Identifiers (URI): Generic Syntax [RFC2396]
• A Trivial Convention for using HTTP in URN Resolution [RFC2169]
• URN Syntax [RFC2141]
• Uniform Resource Locators [RFC1738]
• Relative Uniform Resource Locators [RFC1808]

Cookies let you maintain state with the client, or track 'clickstreams'.

• HTTP State Management Mechanism [RFC2109]
• Internet Draft intended to replace RFC2109
• Netscape's Original Cookie specification (no longer available)

Hypertext Markup Language is the protocol used to design Web hypertext pages. Current widely used version is 2.0, often with extensions. Version 3.2 summarises the current practise.

• HTML 3.2 W3C Reference Specification, more information
• HTML 4.0 more information
• Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) W3C Recommendation, more information.
• Internationalization of HTML [RFC2070]
• Hypertext Markup Language 2.0 [RFC1866]
• HTML Tables [RFC1942 experimental]
• Netscape extensions to HTML 2.0 and HTML 3.0
• Microsoft HTML, DHTML and CSS information
• See also: HTML Internet drafts, W3C HTML specifications

CGI is the common gateway interface, which specifies how web servers can call external applications (scripts, programs or other gateways).

• CGI information and tutorials (NCSA)
• CGI specification

CGI provides a simple way of running programs on the server when a request is received. However they can be inefficient because they need to be started each time a request is made. There are various ways of creating more efficient dynamic responses.

• JServ module for Java programs
• mod_perl for efficient Perl scripts and modules
• FastCGI: a faster version of CGI (Apache module available)

Server-Side Includes are a way of writing commands into normal HTML files. When the HTML file is served to the user, the SSI commands are parsed and executed. Apache implements standard SSI, or you can use an alternate module for more advanced SSI implementations

• Using Server Side Includes Apache Week feature
• Dynamic Page Langaues Apache Week feature
• Apache SSI commands
• NCSA tutorial
• PHP: a full programming language, available as CGI or Apache module
• NeoScript: scripting language module
• Meta-HTML: scripting language CGI
• ePerl: CGI which allows perl to be embedded into HTML

Imagemaps come in several flavours: old-style NCSA cgi-bin program, new Apache imagemap module and client-side imagemaps.

• Using Imagemaps Apache Week feature
• Apache imagemap module
• NCSA imagemap cgi-bin program: NCSA imagemap tutorial
• Client-side imagemaps [RFC1980]

• RFC1766 Language Tags (Specification of tags to identify content language)
• RFC1700 IANA Assigned Numbers (IANA allocates MIME types, character set identifiers)
• RFC2279 UTF-8, a transformation format of ISO 10646 (An expanded character set compatible with US-ASCII)
• RFC2046 MIME Media Types (MIME types are used to identify content type)
• RFC2083 PNG Specification (A portable, lossless, compressed format for graphics)
• All RFCs