Traditional building blocks of the web

Abstract

Traditional Web applications seem vastly different from modern applications, which thrive on technological advances with dynamic content loading, background processing, and continuous data feeds. However, under the hood, these modern applications still rely on the same building blocks used by traditional applications. This chapter briefly introduces these building blocks as required background knowledge, followed by a discussion of several relevant client-side features. These include the browser’s security policies, which are all the more important today, the client-side extensibility features using plugins and browser extensions, and browser features aimed at enhancing the user experience, such as security indicators and private browsing modes.