How a Website Opens...

What Happens When You type a web address and Press Go ???

The terms Internet and World Wide Web are often used in every-day speech without much distinction. However, the Internet and the World Wide Web are not one and the same. The Internet is a global system of interconnected computer networks. In contrast, the Web is one of the services that runs on the Internet. It is a collection of interconnected documents and other resources, linked by hyperlinks and URLs. In short, the Web is an application running on the Internet.^[22]

Viewing a web page on the World Wide Web normally begins either by typing the URL of the page into a web browser, or by following a hyperlink to that page or resource. The web browser then initiates a series of communication messages, behind the scenes, in order to fetch and display it. As an example, consider the Wikipedia page for this article with the URL

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_Wide_Web .

First, the browser resolves the server-name portion of the URL (en.wikipedia.org) into an Internet Protocol address using the global, distributed Internet database known as the Domain Name System (DNS); this lookup returns an IP address such as 208.80.152.2. The browser then requests the resource by sending an HTTP request across the Internet to the computer at that particular address. It makes the request to a particular application port in the underlying Internet Protocol Suite so that the computer receiving the request can distinguish an HTTP request from other network protocols such as e-mail delivery; the HTTP protocol normally uses port 80. The content of the HTTP request can be as simple as the two lines of text

GET /wiki/World_Wide_Web HTTP/1.1

Host: en.wikipedia.org

The computer receiving the HTTP request delivers it to Web server software listening for requests on port 80. If the web server can fulfill the request it sends an HTTP response back to the browser indicating success, which can be as simple as

HTTP/1.0 200 OK

Content-Type: text/html; charset=UTF-8

followed by the content of the requested page. The Hypertext Markup Language for a basic web page looks like

The World Wide Web, abbreviated as WWW and commonly known ...

The web browser parses the HTML, interpreting the markup (, for bold, and such) that surrounds the words in order to draw that text on the screen.

Many web pages consist of more elaborate HTML which references the URLs of other resources such as images, other embedded media, scripts that affect page behavior, and Cascading Style Sheets that affect page layout. A browser that handles complex HTML will make additional HTTP requests to the web server for these other Internet media types. As it receives their content from the web server, the browser progressively renders the page onto the screen as specified by its HTML and these additional resources.

Courtesy :

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_Wide_Web