Berner-Lee's proposal [6] for the project that resulted in the World Wide Web, describes two important building blocks of the Web, the browser and the server. The browser is the program operated by the user. It's job is to display whatever documents the user requests, in a format suitable for the machine configuration. The server is the information storer and provider, delivering the documents requested by the browser.
One of the basic goals of the World Wide Web was to provide hypertext documents, enabling users to follow links to other documents on the Web. A suitable format was defined, called Hypertext Markup Language (HTML) [60]. The format is evolving to adapt to users' needs, so a version 3.2 is under development by World Wide Web Consortium in cooperation with browser vendors [61].
HTML describes the logical structure of a document rather than it's formatting. This allows different platforms and programs to display the contents according to their own conventions, or the user's preferences.
This chapter discusses various ways of including video in Web browsers. The first section describes URLs, the addresses for documents on the Web. Following that is a section on how Web browsers identify the content types of documents. The sections describing viewing video from browsers, include executing external applications, server push and client pull, animated GIFs, browser source code modifications, plug-ins, and Java programming.