How the Web Works

A simple web page is rendered on the screen via the following steps

There are many sub steps in this process but these are the highlights

You instruct the browser which webpage you'd like to see
The browser looks up the site in a 'DNS Server'
- This is like a big phone book for website server addresses
The browser asks the server to send over a specific page of the website developer.mozilla.org/filename.html or developer.mozilla.org
- If asked for a 'root' level address, most servers will return 'root'/index.html
The server sends the HTML file back to the browser
The browser starts to read the HTML file from the top to the bottom, *stopping any time that additional resources are required
- CSS stylesheets
- JavaScript files
- Fonts
- Images
Browser makes requests for additional resources
- Those resources might request even more files
Once the browser gets to the bottom of the page it can start rendering, and then load the page

Next Step