Introduction
How the Web Works
When you type an address like techsnow.com into your browser and press Enter, several things happen in less than a second:
- 1. DNS lookup: the browser asks a DNS server for the IP address of
techsnow.com, like looking up a phone number in a contacts list. - 2. Request: the browser sends an HTTP request to that server asking for the page.
- 3. Response: the server sends back an HTML file.
- 4. More requests: the browser reads the HTML and finds links to CSS files, JavaScript files and images, and requests those too.
- 5. Rendering: the browser puts it all together and paints the page on your screen.
Client and server
| Term | Meaning |
|---|---|
| Client | Your browser (Chrome, Edge, Firefox, Safari). It asks for pages and displays them. |
| Server | A computer on the internet that stores websites and sends them when asked. |
| URL | The address of a page, e.g. https://techsnow.com/tutorials. |
| HTTP / HTTPS | The rules the client and server use to talk. HTTPS is the secure, encrypted version. |
So every website, from Google to YouTube, starts as an HTML document that a server sends to your browser.