opens an internet connection (with the socket module or one of the internet protocol modules)python will happily use whatever internet link exists on your machinebe that dedicated linea dsl lineor simple modem for instanceopening socket on windows pc automatically initiates processing to create connection to your internet provider if needed moreoveras long as your platform supports socketsyou probably can run many of the examples here even if you have no internet connection at all as we'll seea machine name localhost or "(an empty stringusually means the local computer itself this allows you to test both the client and the server sides of dialog on the same computer without connecting to the net for exampleyou can run both socket-based clients and servers locally on windows pc without ever going out to the net in other wordsyou can likely run the programs here whether you have way to connect to the internet or not some later examples assume that particular kind of server is running on server machine ( ftppopsmtp)but client-side scripts themselves work on any internet-aware machine with python installed server-side examples in and require moreto develop cgi scriptsyou'll need to either have web server account or run web server program locally on your own computer (which is easier than you may think--we'll learn how to code simple one in python in advanced third-party systems like jython and zope must be downloaded separatelyof coursewe'll peek at some of these briefly in this but defer to their own documentation for more details in the beginning there was grail besides creating the python languageguido van rossum also wrote world wide web browser in python years agonamed (appropriately enoughgrail grail was partly developed as demonstration of python' capabilities it allows users to browse the web much like firefox or internet explorerbut it can also be programmed with grail applets--python/tkinter programs downloaded from server when accessed and run on the client by the browser grail applets work much like java applets in more widespread browsers (more on applets in the next sectionthough it was updated to run under recent python releases as was finishing this editiongrail is no longer under active development todayand it is mostly used for research purposes (indeedthe netscape browser was counted among its contemporariesneverthelesspython still reaps the benefits of the grail projectin the form of rich set of internet tools to write full-featured web browseryou need to support wide variety of internet protocolsand guido packaged support for all of these as standard library modules that were eventually shipped with the python language because of this legacypython now includes standard support for usenet news (nntp)email processing (popsmtpimap)file transfers (ftp)web pages and interactions (httpurlshtmlcgi)and other commonly used protocols such as telnet network scripting