How Do Webpages Work

Have you ever asked yourself the question, "how does this page show up and why does it look the way it does?" Hopefully after reading this short tutorial I can help you understand!

For you to even be able to view this webpage, you need a web browser. One of the most common web browsers is Microsoft's Internet Explorer. Some other ones are Opera, Netscape, and Mozilla. So what is a web browser?

A web browser is a piece of software that actually does a couple things. When you type a web address like www.jacorre.com in the address bar above, the web browser actually requests that page from a web server which it then displays on your monitor. I'll describe what a web server is further down. But how does the web browser know what to display?

The second thing a web browser does is interprets the HTML tags within the page you requested. By reading the HTML tags it knows that a picture should go somewhere or text should be a certain color. Want to look at HTML tags? Just right click on this page and a menu will appear. Choose the option "View Source" and you'll see HTML tags! Basically, what you see is what I typed to get the page to look the way I want. The web browser interprets what I wrote and then displays what you see before your eyes!

Above I mentioned a web server, well what is that? You can think of a web server as an apartment complex. Each apartment actually stores someone's webpages. Apartments are not for free and neither are webpages! So basically I need to pay "rent" to store my webpages in the apartment. Guess who the landlord is? The landlord is the hosting company. I use a company called WestHost. I pay them to store my webpages on their web server, which will then be available to visitors like you.

So as you go about surfing the web, you now know that web servers around the world deliver webpages to your web browser for your viewing pleasure!

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