Instructing web browsers to request web pages

Hi there,

Sorry if this has been asked already - I had a quick search but am still stumped!

I'm currently designing a system which is supposed to trigger off events coming over the com ports and then send messages to a web client to request a web page from a web server. The client may either be running or not running beforehand. Either is good.

Clearly this is possible, since email clients are able to do this - but I can't seem to find out how. Most of the previous posts have been about making the request from the web client. Does anyone know how I make the web client to it?

I need to do this on Windows not using MFC (also will be on Linux, but that's not important right now...).

Many thanks for all your help!

I'm guessing due to the lack of posts that either

a) this is really hard to do or no-one knows how...
b) I was a bit rude in my post - so apologies if I've just turned up looking for help.

So has anyone got any ideas? A 'no, because..' would be fine... :)