48 Chapter 4 – A Beginner’s Guide to the ServerServers 101
Web Design in a Nutshell, eMatter EditionPopular Server Software
As of this writing, the majority of web servers are running on the Unix platform.
This is why a lot of Unix terminology is still used in the web world. You may even
need to learn a few Unix commands in the course of a job. However, the
percentage of Windows NT, Windows 95, and even Macintosh servers is steadily
increasing. Some server packages offer a graphical interface as an alternative to
Unix command-line controls.
Some popular servers include:
NCSA Server
This is publicly available server software maintained by the National Center
for Supercomputing Applications at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Cham-
paign. It runs on the Unix platform.
Apache
A variation of NCSA, Apache has become the most popular web server due to
the fact that it is a powerful server and it is available for free. It runs prima-
rily on Unix, but is being released to run on other platforms, including
Windows NT.
CERN
This server, maintained by the World Wide Web Consortium, is publicly avail-
able fromhttp://www.w3.org. It is also Unix-based.
Netscape Servers
Netscape provides a variety of commercial server packages that run on Unix
and NT platforms.
Internet Information Server (IIS)
This is Microsoft’s server package. It is freely available, easy to install and
configure, and runs on Windows NT and 95 platforms.
The majority of servers today (approximately 70%) run Apache or its predecessor,
NCSA. The particular brand of server does not impact the majority of things the
designer does, such as making graphics or developing basic HTML files. It will
certainly influence more advanced web site building techniques such as Server
Side Includes (discussed in Chapter 13,Server Side Includes), adding MIME types
(discussed later in this chapter), and database-driven web pages. Be certain to
coordinate with your server administrator if you are using your server in ways
beyond simple HTML and graphic files storage.Basic Server Functions
As a web designer, it is important that you have some level of familiarity with the
following elements of the web server.Root directoryWhen a browser requests a document, the server locates the document, starting
with the document root directory. This is the directory that has been configured to
contain all documents intended to be shared via the Web. The root directory does