It is important to have an idea about basic working of the place where you are going to conduct your business. If you run through a trouble tomorrow then you must be able to understand whether this problem is because of browser, web host, your webpage, your script or your internet connection.



This would save a lot of headaches and confusion.

The World Wide Web is a system of interlinked, hypertext documents accessed via the Internet. With a Web browser, a user views Web pages that may contain text, images, and other multimedia and navigates between them using hyperlinks.

Wikepedia defines World Wide Web ("WWW" or simply the "Web") as a global information medium which users can read and write via computers connected to the internet.

Though technically different, web and internet are used interchangeably.

You can reach any page on web by either typing the URL (Uniform Resource Locator, e.g. - http://www. somewebsite.com/somefolder/somepage.html) of the page into a Web browser, or by following a hypertext link to that page or resource.

A hypertext link is the bluish link where your cursor would take a shape of hand and which when clicked would tell the browser to load the page the link is pointing to. That is how we can travel from one site to another without actually typing the address of the page every time in browser bar. This makes the navigation quite smooth and easy.

We do this everyday. We are familiar with this working. What we generally do not know is the things happening behind the scenes. When you type somewebsite.com/somefolder/somepage.html in the browser, the first step, behind the scenes, is resolving the server-name part of the URL ( somewebsite.com) to be into an IP address by the global, distributed Internet database known as the Domain name system or DNS.

Domain Name System (DNS) serves as the phone book for the Internet. It translates human-readable computer hostnames, e.g. somewebsite.com, into the IP addresses, e.g. 132.14.89.102. This translation or resolution is necessary for the networking equipment needs for delivering information. The browser then establishes a TCP connection with the server at that IP address.

Transmission Control Protocol (TCP) is one of the core protocols of the Internet protocol suite, often simply referred to as TCP/IP. Using TCP, applications on networked hosts can create connections to one another, over which they can exchange streams of data using Stream Sockets. The protocol guarantees reliable and in-order delivery of data from sender to receiver. TCP also distinguishes data for multiple connections by concurrent applications running on the same host.

The next step is sending a HTTP request the Web server, requesting the resource. In the case of a typical Web page, the HTML text is first requested and parsed by the browser, which then makes additional requests for graphics and any other files that form a part of the page in quick succession. These additional file requests give rise to the difference between one single 'page view' and an associated number of server 'hits'.

Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP) is a communications protocol used to transfer or convey information on the World Wide Web. HTTP is a request/response protocol between clients and servers. The originating client, such as a web browser is referred to as the user agent. The destination server, which stores or creates resources such as HTML files and images, is called the origin server.

The Web browser then renders the page as described by the files received, incorporating the images and other resources as necessary. This produces the on-screen page that the viewer sees.

Most Web pages contain hyperlinks to other related pages downloads, source documents, definitions and other Web resources.

This collection of useful, related resources, interconnected via hypertext links, is what has been dubbed a 'web' of information.