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How the Web Works
The Invention of the Web
The web was invented by a man named Tim Berners-Lee in 1989 -
that's 20 years after the start of the Internet. People had been
trying to work out effective ways of sending information around
on the Internet for a while at that point (email was invented in
1971, for example), but there hadn't been any systems that had
really harnessed the net's potential.
The web changed everything. Berners-Lee's big idea was to apply
the idea of links to the Internet: the web would be a mass of
pages that you could move between by clicking on links. He came
up with a format for these pages (HTML), and wrote the first web
browser to view them with, as well as the first web server for
sending them to other people's web browsers.
Links might not seem like much now, but at the time they were
revolutionary. Imagine what the web would be like if you had to
keep typing long addresses every time you wanted to move from
one page to the next, or using long numbered menu systems that
work differently from one site to the next. Without the web,
having Internet access would be pretty useless.
Servers and Browsers
Any time you use a web browser (like Internet Explorer or
Mozilla Firefox), you're using the web. How? Well, it works like
this:
1. You open your web browser, and it goes to your home page.
From there, you can click links to other websites, or to other
parts of the same website. If your home page is a search engine,
then you can type in a search and click links in the search
results. If you know the address of a site you want to go to,
you can type it in, and then click more links from there to keep
going.
2. Each time you click a link, your browser looks at two things
about it: the name of the web server it links to, and the name
of the page it links to on that server. For example, the address
'http://www.example.com/mypage.html' tells the web browser to
get the page called mypage.html from the server at
www.example.com, using HTTP (Hypertext Transfer Protocol). This
server is a real computer, connected to the Internet, that has
the page you want to read stored on its hard disk.
3. To find out where this server is, your web browser looks it
up using DNS (Domain Name System), which turns the text address
into a number. This IP (Internet Protocol) address consists of
four numbers between 0 and 255 - it looks like a phone number.
The Internet is set up to make it easy to find a server anywhere
in the world once you know its IP address, and it can easily
find the quickest route from your ISP (Internet Service
Provider) to the server, and establish communication. This whole
process, from DNS lookup to connection, will often take much
less than a second.
4. Your web browser then sends an HTTP request to that web
server, and the web server responds by sending back the HTML
(Hypertext Markup Language) code for that page. Your web browser
turns this code into a page that you can view. From there, you
can click more links to start the process over again.
Of course, all this is quite simplified: modern browsers and
servers send around much more than HTML code. You can use the
web to download anything now, from pictures to programs, but it
all works in basically the same way.
If something goes wrong somewhere in this process, then you'll
get an error: 'the page cannot be displayed', for example,
usually means that the server's name was wrong, or that it
doesn't have the page you wanted. You might also see errors
saying that the server is currently too busy with other people's
requests to respond, or that the page you wanted has moved. In
each case, the best thing to do is to follow the instructions on
the error page, which usually means checking the address and
trying again.
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