A web page or webpage is a resource of information that is suitable for the World Wide Web and can be accessed through a web browser. This information is usually in HTML or XHTML format, and may provide navigation to other web pages via hypertext links.

Web pages may be retrieved from a local computer or from a remote web server. The web server may restrict access only to a private network, e.g. a corporate intranet, or it may publish pages on the World Wide Web. Web pages are requested and served from web servers using Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP).

Web pages may consist of files of static text stored within the web server's file system (static web pages), or the web server may construct the (X)HTML for each web page when it is requested by a browser (dynamic web pages). Client-side scripting can make web pages more responsive to user input once in the client browser.

Color, typography, illustration and interaction

Web pages usually include instructions as to the colors of text and backgrounds and very often also contain links to images and sometimes other media to be included in the final view.

Layout, typographic and color-scheme information is provided by Cascading Style Sheet (CSS) instructions, which can either be embedded in the HTML or can be provided by a separate file, which is referenced from within the HTML. The latter case is especially relevant where one lengthy stylesheet is relevant to a whole website: due to the way HTTP works, the browser will only download it once from the web server and use the cached copy for the whole site.(notepad)

Images are stored on the web server as separate files, but again HTTP allows for the fact that once a web page is downloaded to a browser, it is quite likely that related files such as images and stylesheets will be requested as it is processed. An HTTP 1.1 web server will maintain a connection with the browser until all related resources have been requested and provided. Browsers usually render images along with the text and other material on the displayed web page.

Dynamic behavior

Main: dynamic web page

Client-side computer code such as JavaScript or code implementing Ajax techniques can be provided either embedded in the HTML of a web page or, like CSS stylesheets, as separate, linked downloads specified in the HTML (using for example .js file extensions for JavaScript files). These scripts may run on the client computer, if the user allows them to, and can provide a degree of interactivity between the web page and the user after the page has downloaded.

Browsers

A web browser can have a Graphical User Interface, like Internet Explorer, Mozilla Firefox, or Opera, or can be text-based, like Lynx. Web users with visual impairments may use a screen reader to read out the displayed text, or they may use a more specialized voice browser in the first place. Such users will want to enjoy the benefit of the web page without images and other visual media.