World Wide Web

:For the world's first web browser, see WorldWideWeb.

How the web works

When you want to access a web page, or other "resource", on the World Wide Web, you normally begin either by typing the URL of the page into your browser, or by following a hypertext link to that page or resource. The first step, behind the scenes, is for the server-name part of the URL to be resolved into an IP address by the global, distributed Internet database known as the Domain name system or DNS.

Related Topics:
Web page - URL - Hypertext - IP address - Internet - Domain name system

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The next step is for an HTTP request to be sent to the web server working at that IP address for the page required. In the case of a typical web page, the HTML text, graphics and any other files that form a part of the page will be requested and returned to the client in quick succession.

Related Topics:
HTTP - HTML

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The web browser's job is then to render the page as described by the HTML, CSS and other files received, incorporating the images, links and other resources as necessary. This produces the on-screen 'page' that you see.

Related Topics:
Render - HTML - CSS

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Most web pages will, themselves, contain hyperlinks to other relevant and informative pages and perhaps to downloads, source documents, definitions and other web resources.

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Such a collection of useful, related resources, interconnected via hypertext links, is what has been dubbed a 'web' of information. Making it available on the Internet produced what Tim Berners-Lee first called the World Wide Web in the early 1990s http://www.w3.org/People/Berners-Lee/FAQ http://www.w3.org/People/Berners-Lee/Kids.

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