How the internet works (again)
You’ve explored how HTML, CSS, and JS come together to make the features on a webpage. Now, let’s take a step back to talk again about how the web works. That way, you can publish websites and share your projects with friends, family, and (maybe) with strangers!
How the Web Works
Our picture of how the web works so far is like this:
- Your browser asks the server for a webpage
- The server sends back HTML, CSS, and JS files (plus images, videos, and other files)
- The browser puts those files together to make the webpage
What’s missing?
There’s a lot that this picture leaves out.
- Domain Names: how does your browser take a URL like kibo.school and find the address of the server to ask for the files?
- Backend Software: how does the server actually send the files back?
- Hardware: things like wires, wifi, routers, and cell towers
- Packets: how do the server and browser actually send the files? What happens if parts of the files don’t make it?
- Search: how does Google know about all the web pages? How does it know which pages to show you when you search?
- Security and Privacy: how do browsers and servers use encryption to protect your information?
- And lots more!
This week, we’ll focus on Domain Names, since that’s what you need to know about to publish and share your site.
Code.org videos about the Internet
What else you’ll learn
In the next few lessons, you’ll learn:
- To use Github Pages as the server for your site
- How to configure a custom domain name
- Other tips and tricks to make sharing your site great