Introduction to HTML and How the World Wide Web Works

How URLs Work

Ever wonder how it is that you can type in, say, www.disney.com, and next thing you know, you find yourself playing games from a computer somewhere far away? Just how is it that your computer knew where to find their computer? It starts with your ISP or internet service provider.

When you typed in www.disney.com, those words were sent, along with your computer's exact parking spot on the internet, to a server controlled by your ISP. That server has a huge database that lists the names of every web site on the internet and the parking spots for their computers. Your ISP looks up the correct parking spot, sends a message to that computer asking it to send your ISP the page you want, and then forwards that page on to your computer. 

Parking spots are called "Dotted Quads" by techno geeks because they consist of four strings of numbers, each separated by a period or dot.

So how does HTML play into all this? Let's find out!