How the web works provides a simplified view of what happens when you view a webpage in a web browser on
your computer or phone. This theory is not essential to writing web code in the short term, but before long you'll really start to benefit from understanding what's happening in the background. Computers connected to the internet are
called clients and servers. A simplified diagram of how they interact might look like this:
The client and server we've described above don't tell the whole story. There are many other parts involved, and we'll describe them below. For now, let's imagine that the web is a road. On one end of the road is the client, which is like your house. On the other end of the road is the server, which is a shop you want to buy something from.
In addition to the client and the server, we also need to say hello to:
So what happens, exactly?When you type a web address into your browser (for our analogy that's like walking to the shop):
Order in which component files are parsedWhen browsers send requests to servers for HTML files, those HTML files often contain
DNS explainedReal web addresses aren't the nice, memorable strings you type into your address bar to find your favorite websites. They are special numbers that look like this: This is called an IP address, and it represents a unique location on the web. However, it's not very easy to remember, is it? That's why Domain Name Servers were invented. These are special servers that match up a web address you type into your browser (like "mozilla.org") to the website's real (IP) address. Websites can be reached directly via their IP addresses. You can use a DNS lookup tool to find the IP address of a website. Packets explainedEarlier we used the term "packets" to describe the format in which the data is sent from server to client. What do we mean here? Basically, when data is sent across the web, it is sent in thousands of small chunks. There are multiple reasons why data is sent in small packets. They are sometimes dropped or corrupted, and it's easier to replace small chunks when this happens. Additionally, the packets can be routed along different paths, making the exchange faster and allowing many different users to download the same website at the same time. If each website was sent as a single big chunk, only one user could download it at a time, which obviously would make the web very inefficient and not much fun to use. See alsoCreditIn this moduleWhat is a collection of different websites you can access through the Internet?The World Wide Web—usually called the Web for short—is a collection of different websites you can access through the Internet. A website is made up of related text, images, and other resources.
What is used to access the websites?A web browser is a type of software that allows you to find and view websites on the Internet. Even if you didn't know it, you're using a web browser right now to read this page! There are many different web browsers, but some of the most common ones include Google Chrome, Safari, and Mozilla Firefox.
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