With a Web server on z/OS®, such as HTTP Server, the serving of static Web pages is similar to Web servers on other platforms. The user sends an HTTP request to HTTP Server to obtain a specific file. HTTP Server retrieves the file from its file repository and sends it to the user, along with information about the file (such as mime type and size) in the HTTP header.

HTTP Server has a major difference from other Web servers, however. Because z/OS systems encode files in EBCDIC, the documents on z/OS must first be converted to the ASCII format typically used on the Internet (binary documents such as pictures need not be converted).

HTTP Server performs these conversions, thus saving the programmer from performing this step. However, the programmer must use FTP to load documents on the server. That is, the programmer specifies ASCII as the FTP transport format to have the file converted from EBCDIC. For binary transfers, the file is not converted.