4
I was wondering what happens when we type a url like http://www.mydomain.com
? How does it know where to go to get the pages of mydomain.com? How does all this happen?
4
I was wondering what happens when we type a url like http://www.mydomain.com
? How does it know where to go to get the pages of mydomain.com? How does all this happen?
8
An URL is just an address, a reference. So here is how it is happening:
This is a very very condensed explication. I do not speak about SSL, compression, language and character encoding negotiation, authentication, CGI, pipe-lining and keep-alives.
@nickgrim That's more the fault of a poorly written question. – Shadur – 2014-09-11T07:03:37.410
isnt there any role of DNS and ISP in it? – OM The Eternity – 2012-01-06T05:43:02.850
DNS is, usually, used by resolver library for gethostbyname() call to translate from hostnames to IP addresses. – Mircea Vutcovici – 2012-01-06T05:54:52.423
ISP is used on the OSI layers bellow TCP. – Mircea Vutcovici – 2012-01-06T05:55:46.773
To understand what is happening use a network sniffer like Wireshark and a HTTP debug proxy like Fiddler – Mircea Vutcovici – 2012-01-06T05:57:58.537
I downvoted this. It's a detailed answer, but I don't think it's an answer to what the OP's actually asking. It seems like the OP's after an explanation of DNS and you sort of skipped over that in your step 3. – None – 2012-01-06T11:24:47.407
Well, you can write an entire encyclopedia just to explain all details for a "simple" thing like a HTTP request. – Mircea Vutcovici – 2012-01-06T13:56:39.333
Why the downovtes? It's a very basic question but I don't see anything particularly wrong with it. – None – 2012-01-06T08:30:54.313
1I didn't downvote it, but it's not clear how much detail the OP wants (and whether they even know that this is a very wide open question). Do the just want an explanation of DNS? Routing? TCP? – None – 2012-01-06T11:25:17.577