Fetching A Web Page

Before you can read a book, you need to pick it up. Similarly, before you can read a web page, you have to fetch it from the Internet. So, how do we go about fetching a web page to read? Well, guess what? It's just like the real world.

Suppose you want to read The Hobbit. You might do something like this:

• Look up the address of your local library
• Walk to the library
• Find the right shelf
• Pick up The Hobbit

Now, suppose you want to read a web page, for example: http://www.gondolin.org.uk/index.html

• Look up the address of the server, www.gondolin.org.uk (see How Does The DNS Work? for details on how this happens)
• Connect to the server
• Look in the appropriate directory (in this case it's at the top level, "/")
• Copy the page to a file to your computer (index.html).

Copying web pages to your computer usually uses a standard known as the HyperText Transfer Protocol, or HTTP. This is why most web addresses begin with "http://" (or "https://" - the secure (encrypted) version of HTTP) - that tells your computer how it should talk to the server (a bit like knowing what language to speak when you talk to the librarian in the library example.)