An application server is a machine (an executable process running on some machine, actually) that "listens" (on any channel, using any protocol), for requests from clients for whatever service it provides, and then does something based on those requests. (may or may not involve a respose to the client)
A Web server is process running on a machine that "listens" specifically on TCP/IP Channel using one of the "internet" protocols, (http, https, ftp, etc..) and does whatever it does based on those incoming requests... Generally, (as origianly defined), it fetched/generated and returned an html web page to the client, either fetched from a static html file on the server, or constructed dynamically based on parameters in the incoming client request.
Application servers exposes business logic to a client. So its like application server comprises of a set of methods(not necessarily though, can even be a networked computer allowing many to run software on it) to perform business logic. So it will simply output the desired results, not HTML content. (similar to a method call). So it is not strictly HTTP based.
But web servers passes HTML content to web browsers (Strictly HTTP based). Web servers were capable of handling only the static web resources, but the emergence of server side scripting helped web servers to handle dynamic contents as well. Where web server takes the request and directs it to the script (PHP, JSP, CGI scripts, etc.) to CREATE HTML content to be sent to the client. Then web server knows how to send them back to client. BECAUSE that's what a web server really knows.
Having said that, nowadays developers use both of these together. Where web server takes the
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