How the Web works
Objectives
- Explain client / server
- Understand URL, DNS, HTTP
- Tell browser and rendering engine apart
Lesson
The Web is a dialogue: your browser (client) asks a server for a resource over HTTP/HTTPS. The address you type (URL) is resolved by DNS into an IP address.
A page isn’t “one magic file”: the server returns HTML, often plus CSS, JS, images. The browser parses, lays out, and paints (rendering pipeline).
HTTPS encrypts the connection (TLS). In production, plain HTTP sites are rare.
DevTools (Network tab) show each request: status 200, 301, 404, 500… Learn these codes early — they save hours of debugging.
HTML structures, CSS presents, JavaScript behaves. Next.js assembles these layers with React, routing and deploy — but the foundations stay the same.
Assessment
Assessment
1. What does DNS do?
2. HTTPS mainly…