<P> The primary purpose of a web browser is to bring information resources to the user ("retrieval" or "fetching"), allowing them to view the information ("display", "rendering"), and then access other information ("navigation", "following links"). </P> <P> This process begins when the user inputs a Uniform Resource Locator (URL), for example http://en.wikipedia.org/, into the browser . The prefix of the URL, the Uniform Resource Identifier or URI, determines how the URL will be interpreted . The most commonly used kind of URI starts with http: and identifies a resource to be retrieved over the Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP). Many browsers also support a variety of other prefixes, such as https: for HTTPS, ftp: for the File Transfer Protocol, and file: for local files . Prefixes that the web browser cannot directly handle are often handed off to another application entirely . For example, mailto: URIs are usually passed to the user's default e-mail application, and news: URIs are passed to the user's default newsgroup reader . </P> <P> In the case of http, https, file, and others, once the resource has been retrieved the web browser will display it . HTML and associated content (image files, formatting information such as CSS, etc .) is passed to the browser's layout engine to be transformed from markup to an interactive document, a process known as "rendering". Aside from HTML, web browsers can generally display any kind of content that can be part of a web page . Most browsers can display images, audio, video, and XML files, and often have plug - ins to support Flash applications and Java applets . Upon encountering a file of an unsupported type or a file that is set up to be downloaded rather than displayed, the browser prompts the user to save the file to disk . </P> <P> Information resources may contain hyperlinks to other information resources . Each link contains the URI of a resource to go to . When a link is clicked, the browser navigates to the resource indicated by the link's target URI, and the process of bringing content to the user begins again . </P>

What is the role of web browser in html
find me the text answering this question