How the web works: The Technology

Thank you for stopping by for How the web works II: The Wrath of Conn.

If you have not read my first post on this, you can find it here:

The web works on three standards. These standards are generally adhered to by all companies that make products that work with the web.

URL (Uniform Resource Locator): These are the addresses you enter into a web browser to connect to a website. The URL is broken up into 4 parts which are the protocol, the hostname, the port number, and the path that you are requesting.

Protocol: This is the string of characters you see before the hostname. Examples include http, ftp, telnet, etc. They are separated from the hostname with a colon and two forward slashes ( ://). These protocols tell your browser what type of service to use when you connect with the web browser to the hostname. 

If you leave the protocol off your address, by default the Web Browser will assume you are using the HTTP protocol, which is for connecting to web sites, so there is no need to type in the http:// every time you go to a web site. If you specify another protocol like ftp, then the browser will act as an ftp client that will enable you to connect to a ftp server to download files.

Hostname: the address you are going to, minus the Protocol.

Port Number: The port number is a number that you can append to the host name with a colon between them. An example of this would be adding the port number 80. If you leave the port number off, the web browser will assume that the port number is 80 because that is the default port for the http protocol.

Path: This is the path on the server, culminating with the filename you are trying to reach. This path corresponds to an actual directory structure on the web server. So on the web server there is a root directory, a files directory underneath that root directory, and the file you are looking for.

HTTP (Hyper Text Transfer Protocol): This is a defined process of how to transfer information between a web browser and a web server. All web browsers and web servers follow this process.

HTML: (Hyper Text Markup Language): This is the language used in web pages to format text, images, and page layout. This language is in pure text and is entered into a file that has an ending of html.

Thank You for reading. I invite readers to comment with any questions or comments.