To be able to give each aspect of a live website a fair look, we need to break down the overall picture into its constituent parts and look at each part individually. Before we do that, though, it is important to start at the broadest possible level and work our way down to the individual technologies that assist us in making our osCommerce site. With that in mind, the following diagram shows a basic view of how the Internet works:
Thankfully, we don't have to concern ourselves with most of the details at this stage. It is enough for our purposes to know that in Area 1 of the diagram (with a grey background), computers (or even mobile phones and other devices) can connect to the Internet and can locate various files and data from wherever they need to. Communication between a user's laptop (or desktop) and Internet servers can occur in one of two forms; either Hyper Text Transfer Protocol (HTTP) or File Transfer Protocol (FTP). Both are used to facilitate...