In web development the terms \"server\" and \"client\" are often refered to when

Question

In web development the terms "server" and "client" are often refered to when discussing how pages are requested on the web. It is also used exstensively when talking about PC, phone, tablets, etc. The question that came to my mind was what qualified a computer to be considered a client?

I took a look at this article from wikipedia and noticed that clients are considered service requesters whereas Servers are considered service providers. If this is true couldn't all computers that request a service in a sense be considered a client?

The stereotype I noticed is that a client computer is usually synonymous with a "consumer" computer, but according to wikipedia this is not entirely accurate. Any idea on how to draw the line in this common scenario?

Explanation / Answer

Clients request data from servers. Does this help?

Also, clients and servers are processes (in this context), not computers. If you point your browser to http://localhost and serve a webpage from your machine, your computer acts as both client and server. The client is your web browser; the server is Apache, NginX (or IIS), which serves the page.

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