Let's say that you are sitting at your computer, surfing the Web, and you get a call from a friend who says, "I just read a great article! Type in this URL and check it out! It's at http://www.mysite.com/web-server.htm." So you type that URL into your browser and press return. And magically, no matter where in the world that URL lives, the page pops up on your screen!

At the most basic level possible, the following diagram shows the steps that brought that page to your screen:

Your browser formed a connection to a Web server, requested a page and received it. If you want to get into a bit more detail, here are the basic steps that occurred behind the scenes:

• The browser broke the URL into three parts:
  1. The protocol ("http")
  2. The server name ("www.mysite.com")
  3. The file name ("web-server.htm")

• The browser communicated with a name server to translate the server name "www.mysite.com" into an IP Address, which it uses to connect to the server machine.

• The browser then formed a connection to the server at that IP address on port 80. (We'll discuss ports later in this article.)

• Following the HTTP protocol, the browser sent a GET request to the server, asking for the file "http://www.mysite.com/web-server.htm."

• The server then sent the HTML text for the Web page to the browser.

• The browser read the HTML tags and formatted the page onto your screen.