How the Web Works
Now that we know what we're building, we need to look at what we'll need to make it available once it's done. Let's take a look at what a web server actually does.
When you access a Web page with your browser, you are communicating with another computer, possibly halfway across the world. Here's what happens:
Your computer looks up the IP address of the computer you're calling. Every computer on the Internet—including yours, while you're connected—has a unique IP address that identifies it to the rest of the Internet. For example, the IP address for http://www.yahoo.com is (as of this writing) 204.71.200.67. The IP address is like the computer's phone number.
Your computer sends out a message, or request, to that address. To ...
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