Protocols

Computer communication would be otherwise impossible without protocols. As a matter of fact, protocols are central to everything we do on the internet or other forms of computer networks. We'll discuss what they are and how they work.

Let's consider this example:

https://google.com is a website accessed everyday on the internet. Below is concise description of what goes on under the hood when you visit this webpage. (Included some technical terms but I'll explain them on the next page).

As you have might have noticed, a webpage would typically start with an http:// or https://.

1. The browser uses a DNS ¹ resolver to translate the domain name into an IP² address of the server.

2. The browser uses this IP address to connect to the server and request for a copy of the resource.

3. The server resolves this request and responds to the browser.

4. The browser receives the response and parses it as HTML³.

5. The browser renders the page.

When all these sequence happens, we typically say that "the page is loading".

As established in the previous parts of this module, the internet is a collection of resources and everything we access on the web (internet) is stored on a computer somewhere. The HTTP⁴ is a protocol that help us make request to access these resources.