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 you can access every day on the internet. Below is a concise description of what happens behind the scenes when you visit a webpage. (Some technical terms are included, but they will be explained on the next page.)

As you might have noticed, a webpage address typically starts with 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 steps happen, we typically say that "the page is loading."

As established earlier in this module, the internet is a collection of resources, and everything we access on the web is stored on a computer somewhere. HTTP⁴ is the protocol that lets us request and access those resources.

1. DNS is protocol which stands for a Domain Name System ↩

2. IP - internet protocol ↩

3. Hypertext Markup Language ↩

4. HTTP - Hypertext Transfer Protocol ↩