NWE Help: Web: Intro: Viewing Page Code

Here's how viewing a web page works. Let's assume you are trying to look at the NWE home page.

You launch your web browser and type the address you want to view in the "Location" box (for Netscape) or the "Address" box (for Explorer). The address you type is http://www.nwe.ufl.edu/writing/index.html.
Your broswer looks up the path to the www.nwe.ufl.edu server (this is called a domain name lookup).
Your browser uses the HTTP protocol to ask the www.nwe.ufl.edu server for the file index.html in the writing directory.
The server generates a response. If the file is there and publically available, the server will send a copy of the file to your browser. Otherwise an error will be displayed.
Your browser decodes the HTML and displays the result on your screen. If the file contains images, steps 3-4 will be repeated for each image.

You can see all this happening if you watch the lower left corner of your browser window while a web page is loading. You can also look at the Netscape icon in the upper right of the screen--if it's moving, the page is still loading.

Most browsers cache the pages and images you visit on your hard drive and check to see if they've been updated before downloading new copies. For example, if you look at CNN.com for news often, your browser will have local copies of all the images used in the menus and toolbars. That saves a lot of download time.

The NWE uses a cache server to speed this process even further. Instead of saving a separate cache for everyone in the NWE, the cache server keeps ONE big cache area. So if your neighbor has been to CNN recently, the NWE cache server can provide that data to you immediately (and that's a lot faster than going across the Web to a busy server).