We are all more or less familiar with the concept of a website or web pages, but we may not know exactly how a website works. In the following you will find an overview of the components of websites, how they work and interact with them.
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What is a website?
A website is a collection of specific documents and files, including text, images, links, colors, and anything else you see on a website, that together form a web page. Access to websites is usually done through a domain name such as orangency.com, which instructs your computer where to access the website to access the required files. A domain name is like an address in the world of the Internet.
What is a browser?
Websites will be accessible through web browsers. Web browsers are software that can download and display websites and their components. In other words, web browsers must be used to access websites and view photos, text, videos, etc. in them. You will be able to access content related to this URL by entering a domain name such as orangency.com in browsers. By entering the address orangency.com in popular browsers such as Mozilla Firefox, Google Chrome and Safari, you are actually instructing the browser to extract and display various files from this address in a way that is visible to you.
What is an HTML document?
Web pages are all written in HTML markup language, and browsers actually translate these HTML documents so that we can view and use them. HTML stands for Hyper Text Markup Language.
Texts, images, colors, etc. are all saved in HTML file with .html extension. Browsers look for files with the .html extension so that they can display its contents for inclusion. Of course, in the future it will be more closely examined that some of the contents of a web design may have other extensions (such as an image file that may be saved with a .png extension) but it is mentioned in the HTML file and finally this HTML file Which is checked and displayed by browsers.
What is a web host or web server?
Now we know that a website actually contains a series of HTML files and other related files. All of these files are located on computers called web servers. When you enter an address in the browser, the browser actually asks the web server of that website to provide the files needed to display that website.
It can be said that web servers are nothing but home computers and like them include operating system, a number of files and folders and so on. Web servers are characterized by high-speed Internet connection and a large amount of data storage space (such as hard disks in personal computers). But the most important feature of web servers is that they are able to respond to the requests of visitors to a website that is sent to them through browsers. Web-servers such as Amazon have to respond daily to millions of different requests from users around the world, such as product descriptions, images, purchase orders, and more.
What are server-side languages and client-side languages?
As mentioned, HTML is a language used by web browsers to display websites. Of course, there are other languages and technologies in this area, such as CSS and JavaScript, etc., which we have mentioned in previous articles. All of these languages and technologies are called client-side languages, and programming in this area is called client-side programming or front-end programming.
While HTML is a language used by web browsers to display websites, web servers use other languages to process requests, manage information and files, store information, and more. These languages and the technologies used in them are called server-side languages and server-side programming is called back-end programming. Languages like NodeJs, PHP, ASP and so on.
How Do Websites Work?
When you enter a website address in your browser, your browser sends a request to a web server that contains files related to that website. The browser downloads HTML files, images, videos, etc. and makes them viewable. In the web-development space, technologies related to processing and displaying information in the browser are called front-end or user-side technologies.
For example, when you submit forms such as your credit card information to a website using forms on web pages, this information is managed and processed by server technologies, and the response is ready and sent to you. These languages, which also play an important role in communicating with databases, are known as back-end technologies.