Agenda
What is Web ?
Building Blocks of Web
How Browser works ?
What is web ?
The web or WWW (world wide web) is a huge network of connected computers.
In 1989 the world wide web was invented by Sir Tim Berners-Lee.
He was trying to find a new way for scientists to easily share the data from their experiments.
He also made the world’s first web browser and web server.
Reference - Business Insider
Tim suggested three main technologies that meant all computers could understand each other (HTML, URL and HTTP).
All of these remain in use today. We will learn about these 3 words in next slides.
1989 onwards web is developed, initial version was web 1.0, current version is 2.0 & future is of web 3.0.
Importance of web
World is connected via web. (Services from financial, entertainment, govt. & education domains are available at finger
tips).
Accessible to anyone, anywhere & anytime
Different people can get the right information in many times with ease.
Problems solved the lack of time and the lack of money for people through the acceleration of the completion of routine
work, especially government work, most of the work today can be implemented very easily and quickly through specialized
websites such things as government sites.
Make it easier for people to shop through e-shopping sites, where people can purchase anything they need from
anywhere in the world through these sites.
These sites are highly reliable and easy to make money with.
It facilitated the individuals who wish to complete their educational journey by doing this through distance learning
through communication with the university to which the student has joined.
Some of them have been able to provide different types of entertainment for people. People can watch television
channels, play entertaining and useful games, watch movies, read books, watch cartoons, watch videos & so on.
Through some websites can start private businesses that generate a good income on individuals leading to financial
independence.
Reference :
BBC
Evolution of the Web
Reference: NFT Marketplaces in India Top 10 Most Expensive NFTs Ever Sold
Power of Web3
Blockchain can bring as big revolution as the internet.
Learn how a small country with limited resources & population is 50+
Lakhs transformed lives of refugees using blockchain technology better than US
and Canada - Ethereum Smart Contracts
Building Blocks of Web
There are 4 Building Blocks of the Web
Content
It means anything from these we see on the Internet
Client & Server
Client request the data & server sends the required info to the client.
Once you open facebook.com
machine from where web page is served to you is server.
Apart from this, any device through which we request information from
server, is a client.
Protocol
Protocols are rules, they are followed by the server and the client to
communicate with each other securely.
There are a lot of protocols but in full stack web development, we deal
with https (Hypertext Transfer Protocol Secure) & http (earlier used)
Any data you fetch from or submit to server,
travels through 100s of networking devices hackers can see / steal these data from such devices.
So we need to convert the data to some format so that only client and
server can understand - no other device or human.
In software engineering, converting plain data to un-understandable
form is called encryption.
Once the encrypted data reaches to the receiver (in current topic - it’s a
server), it needs to convert back to normal / plain form to make sense out of it.
This reverse conversion is called decryption.
Here is how communication happens securely between browser and
server.
243 is just a random number generated by client, we call it as session
key or symmetric key. In real world this key is big string.
Reference
IBM
SSL
Identifications
It means verify the client very well before giving the precious data.
Value of our data on banking sites, social media is not less than millions
of dollars. Hence it is a very strong need that every request must be verified.
In the world of internet, this process is divided in 2 - Authentication &
Authorisation.
How browser works?
We will focus on 2 things here :
Architecture of Web Browser :
User Interface
Visual elements of the browser with which user interacts.
ie. Address bar, home button, next or previous buttons, bookmarks bar
Rendering Engine
As name suggests, it renders basically everything for you in web page.
Text, Audio, Video, images, JSON, XML etc.
Browser engine
A bridge between the user interface and the rendering engine. It queries and handles the rendering engine as per the inputs received
from the user interface.
Networking UI Backend
A web page is mixture of images, videos, css files, javascript files. All such contents exists on some servers.
Networking means fetch the required data/files securely.
JavaScript Interpreter
Parse and executes the JavaScript code.
Networking UI Backend
Does the math for all the elements - height, width of elements then it’s children etc. - This is called layouting in the browser.
Once layouting is done, then it draws the elements pixel by pixel with specified colors. - This is called painting in the browser.
Data Persistence
A browser stores various types of data locally.
i.e Cookies. (just delete it from a website you are signed in & you will be signed out) Image / CSS / JavaScript files etc. This speedup
the page rendering.
How rendering works?
This is one of most interesting process each browser performs when it receives the html content from server.
Reference
Udacity
Browser Stack
Let's start with the most obvious way of using the internet :
You visit a website like almabetter.com
The moment you enter this address in your browser and you hit ENTER, a lot of
different things happen:
The URL gets resolved
A Request is sent to the server of the website
The response of the server is parsed
The page is rendered and displayed
Every single step could be split up in multiple other steps, but for a good
overview of how it all works, that's something we can ignore here.
Interview Questions :
Give an overview of what is web ?
The World Wide Web is a way of exchanging information between computers on the internet, tying them together into a vast collection
of interactive multimedia resources.
Web consists of billions of clients and servers connected through wire and wireless network.
What are protocols in web technology ?
Protocols are the established set of rules and guidelines for communicating data. Rules are defined for each step and process during
communication between two or more computers.
What is main work of browser engine in the browser ?
The primary job of a browser engine is to transform HTML documents and the other resources of a web page into an interactive visual
representation on a user's device.The engine combines all the relevant css rules to calculate precise graphical coordinates for the
visual representation it will show on the screen.
