Active Server Pages 3.0 from Scratch

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:

1. 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.

2. Your computer sends out a message, or request, to that address. To ...