How the Web Works

Have you ever stopped to think about how complex the internet really is?

The web is just one piece in the puzzle, but it’s a fantastic example of technology working for us 24/7.

Even more amazing is the fact that most of the web’s biggest components operate silently in the background.

What Is the Web?

The Web is more than just a network of computers hooked together. It’s linked by languages and protocols that allow communication between technologies that can’t normally ‘talk’ to each other.

When you type in a web address, your computer converts the URL to an IP address using a domain name system (DNS) server.

The server has a list of domain names and IP addresses and can convert between them.

This entire process takes only a fraction of a second.

How a Computer Finds a Website

Every computer on the web can only see the computers it is directly connected to.

That means your request has to hop to your router, then to a network, then to that network’s router, and so on. Finally, the connection arrives at a machine that is directly connected to the site in question.

You can watch this process take place by using a tool called traceroute. The path is rarely direct and is often quite inefficient. But somehow, it works.

The TCP/IP Handshake

Finally, the two computers have to talk. Their common language is TCP/IP.

To begin, the computers process a TCP/IP handshake:

1. Syn: The first computer, the one requesting the connection, sends a “SYN” or SYNchronize packet to the host. Among other things, it chooses the starting number for counting the additional packets of data so they remain in order.
2. Syn/Ack: The computer receiving then responds with its own SYN packet, providing a connection number and an ACKnowledgment receipt of the first packet.
3. Ack: The computer that initiated the connection sends its own ACK packet to complete the handshake.

Any time you connect to a new server, your computer follows this process in order to receive data from the server.

Giant Leaps

These protocols and processes are as old as the Web. Even as we’ve moved from static sites to dynamic ones, the basic tools haven’t changed and are still working just as well as they did at the beginning.