Section 01: Introduction

 

The goals

🤔Understand how the web works and what web developers do

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what do web developers do?

The answer is simple.
Web developers build websites! I mean generally speaking! cause there are some other web services which will also be covered in-depth throughout the course.

Then how does the web actually work?

1. In the browser we search address, and this address has an official name as URL which stands for a Uniform Resources Locator.
2. Our browser sends a so-called request to some remote computer out there in the internet, a coumputer oerated by the company that owns the website, which we are trying to visit. And this request is standardized to speak same language with server and we called this HTTP or HTTPS which stand for Hypertext Transfer Protocol Secure. So basically this communication between browser and this remote computer(sever) is encrypted.
3. Now the website code is required for showing something on the screen and this code is written by web developers working for this company. This code holds a bunch of browser instructions that tell the browser what is should display on the screen. So which content it should show and how the content should look like.
4. This remote computer sends back the answer in a so-called response to our browser, and our browser knows how to handle this instructions because these are standardized as well. So, finally it can bring up to our screen.

And as a web developer, we write the instructions of response that we give to the browser.

 

What are these 'browser instructions'?

This is just the code is written by a web developer and then interpreted and executed by the browser. And we need to understand three main languages to write this code which are HTML, CSS and JavaScript.

 

Let's check how the web works in-depth

 

• protocol: we don't have to worry about this a lot as a web developer! because it is basically handled for us.
• domain: this is the human-readable address('identifier') of a website!
• path: this is not part of every URL, paths act as pointers to specific resources, specific pages on a website.
• IP Adress: Internet Protocol / IP Address
  A unique identifier('address') of network devices.
  

We use this IP Adress to build connection between requesting browser and responsing computer. And so we need this special servers which are operated by global organizations, ths so-called DNS servers.
DNS stands for Domain Name System, and these are the servers that contain mapping tables with all known domains, and the IP Address that belong to these domains. So, the IP Address of the remote computers that host the websites that belong to certain domains.
So, actually, our browser first talks to DNS server to translate the domain into an IP address. And then once that IP address was returned, then our browser sends the actual request to this remote machine, to this server serving a website.

 

 

Sources

https://academind.com/tutorials/how-the-web-works
https://www.hostinger.com/tutorials/what-is-a-url