21.1 The Mighty, Mighty Browser
Behold the mighty browser:
A web browser is an extraordinarily complex piece of technology that we use
every day. Amazingly, it’s also pretty dumb about some things.When we tell a browser that we want a website or a page on a website, it
sends a request through the Internet to a publicly available machine:As you can see, when you ask your browser to show a site, your browser
makes a request through the Internet. This request asks one particular web
server for information that it has. That information might be an HTML web
page, it might be an image, it might be a movie, and it might be JavaScript.To reach the right server, our browser has to look up the public Internet
address of the web server. Google’s Internet address for http://www.google.com is
173.194.73.147. The numbers in the address are enough for the Internet to get
the browser’s request to the web server.Chapter 21. Getting Code on the Web • 208
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