AppleScript in a Nutshell

Chapter 31. Web Sharing Control Panel

Personal Web Sharing is a powerful (but potentially hazardous) technology that was introduced with Mac OS 8.5. Using the Web Sharing control panel and extension, you can turn your computer into a web server over an intranet or the Internet. As long as they know your IP address and/or domain name, people can connect to a home page that you designate in the Web Sharing control panel just by entering your address in their web browsers. Domain names are the plain English versions of numerical IP addresses, such as www.nateweb.net.

Tip

You know you have Web Sharing installed if you have a Web Sharing control panel and a Web Pages folder on your hard drive. Web Sharing is installed by default with Mac OS 9.

For example, if your IP address on the Web happened to be 207.169.50.110 and you have started up Web Sharing on your machine, then another person on the Web would just have to enter http://207.169.50.110 in their web browser and up pops your designated home page or a directory listing of your web folder. This also applies to people who have dial-up connections to the Web and are dynamically assigned IP addresses by their Internet Service Providers. When they are online, they can use the TCP/IP control panel to find out their IP address at the moment, and as long as they have started up Web Sharing on their machines, a web user can connect to their designated web page by using that IP address as the URL. You can even run Common Gateway Interface ...