Notes from Video: How websites works

What is a web page?

A collection of files put together like pieces of a puzzle by HTML.

HTML (hypertext markup language) is codes added to text to convey format and organization.  For example,  <p>This is a paragraph</p> 
HTML organizes the pieces of the puzzle into the desired presentation.

HTML is not a "programming" language, it does not transform or do computations on the text. An example of programming would be changing the text dynamically to be all lower case.

Where do web pages live?

Web sites (collections of pages) reside on a web server. Generally speaking, a server is any computer that provides a service, such as email, web pages, weather reports, etc.

We often use the term "server" to refer to the computer, but in reality what makes it a server is that it is running server software. There's nothing special about the computing machine, it has a processor and a hard drive just like any workstation. What's special is that it has sofware that listens for requests and then provides a service to those requests.

How does the webpage get to your computer?

Each server has an address: IP address. (So does every device connected to the internet.)
When a URL is entered into a browser, the browser consults the domain name system to find the IP address for that URL, then sends the request to the internet which gets forwarded to the server, who then responds with the pages you requested.