ABSTRACT
This chapter demonstrates the link between the Internet and Bioinformatics by showing how the two have evolved together. It provides an overview of modern Web technologies and the importance of these in Bioinformatics. The chapter introduces some of the major technologies of the Web: HyperText Markup Language and Cascading Style Sheets used for creating web pages, eXtensible Markup Language (XML) used to exchange and store data, eXtensible Stylesheet Language Transformations used to transform and reformat XML files and Simple Object Access Protocol, a mechanism for accessing services on remote computers. The chapter describes the progression of the Web from a system for simple serving of documents to a distributed database using semantic markup. The Internet and the World Wide Web have revolutionized data and information handling. Access to the hundreds of gigabytes of genome and protein structure data by the worldwide community of scientists would simply not be possible without it.
