Appendix A Infrastructure for Electronic Commerce

Regardless of their basic purpose, virtually all e-commerce sites rest on the same network structures, communication protocols, and Web standards. This infrastructure has been under development for over 30 years. This appendix briefly reviews the structures, protocols and standards underlying the millions of sites used to sell to, service, and chat with both customers and business partners. It also looks at the infrastructure of some newer network applications, including streaming media and peer-to-peer (P2P)....