An Artist's Guide to Programming

6 Network Communications

Sketch 48: Opening a Web Page

A web page is really just a text file containing the description of that page in enough detail to draw it on the screen. A program called a browser reads and renders that file into a viewable page. The file itself resides on a computer somewhere on the internet, and in order to display it, we must first upload it to the user’s computer. The browser arranges for this to be done, but the file must have a unique name that identifies it—unique in the whole world, because the internet is a planetwide network. This unique name is called the Uniform (or Universal) Resource Locator, shortened ...