How Web Works?
There may be different versions available for you to understand and get answers to this question. My way of explaining this is through an Analogy. I believe Analogy helps us to understand complex things.
On the web, there are many parts involved. Let’s imagine, that you are staying in an apartment, and consider yourself a web user.
Assume, you have a kitchen with a minion chef in your apartment, who has an army of minions who can go out and buy ingredients and cook for you. You can imagine that kitchen as the Web Browser(Client). Same as, how these minions serve you the food that you requested, the Web browser serves us stunning beautiful websites upon our request.
There are shops in front of your apartment where your minions need to reach and buy things to prepare and serve your food. Consider that shop as a Web Server that serves the web content to your browser.
The minion needs to reach the shop by going all the way down and moving around to reach the shop, but imagine if there are a lot of bushes and obstacles around, and there is no connectivity between them?
We need to call someone to clear all the obstacles around your apartment to have connectivity with the outside world, so the minions can reach the shop. Consider that as an Internet connection, you need to call an internet service provider to have an internet connection to browse the internet.
Now that your minions can reach the shop, imagine if many more minions like yours come out of their apartments, it will be chaos. That can be controlled by having traffic rules which will help the commuters to reach their destination without any trouble. We can compare this to TCP/IP network communication protocol on Internet, which stands for Transmission Control Protocol/Internet Protocol. TCP’s role is to ensure the packets are reliably delivered and error-free.
Now we have a proper connection to reach the shop, but If we have more shops out there, You need to mention a particular shop name where the minion can get the ingredients for your yummy soup. Similarly, the webservers need to be mapped with a name so that we can easily request it from our browser since the web servers can be identified only using their IP addresses. Here comes a special server called DNS — Domain Name Server, which keeps the mapping of the website name and its server’s IP address.
Our minions can now go down the apartment and reach the shop and identify it using the name. They can travel to the shop in many ways, by walking/skateboarding, scooter or bus. They need to get the ingredients for the soup (or any other dish) in small packets. Let's say our minions take the food delivery scooter, which is designed to deliver packed foods, where they can carry the packets in a locked or open box.
On the web, we can compare it with HTTP/HTTPS — HyperText Transfer Protocol. It is an application-layer protocol for transmitting hypermedia documents, such as HTML. It was designed for communication between web browsers and web servers. HTTPS is an encrypted version of the HTTP protocol. It uses SSL or TLS to encrypt all communication between a client and a server. This secure connection allows clients to safely exchange sensitive data with a server, such as when performing banking activities or online shopping.
This is how the web works, Once the minions reach the kitchen they will start preparing your food, that is how the web browser renders the web page, we can see that in the next article, How does the Web Browser work?
