Networking - The Web

Accessing the Internet

• The Internet can be accessed in many different ways, with the web being one of the most prevalent methods.

Websites

• Websites are formatted text documents created using HTML (Hypertext Markup Language), which is a coding language recognized by web browsers.

• Web pages contain multimedia content, such as:

  • Text

  • Images

  • Audio

  • Video

URLs and Domain Names

• To navigate to a website, users type in a URL (Uniform Resource Locator), such as www.reddit.com.

• Breakdown of a URL:

  • www: Stands for "worldwide web."

  • reddit.com: The domain name, which can be registered by anyone.

  • ICANN (Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers) registers domain names and ensures exclusivity. Once registered, no one else can claim the domain unless it becomes available again.

  • Domain extensions (e.g., .com, .edu, .net) indicate the type of website:

    • .edu is commonly used for educational institutions.

Understanding IP Addresses

• Computers utilize IP addresses to locate each other on the Internet.

• Example: Typing 172.217.6.46 into a web browser leads to Google's homepage because of the mapping between IP addresses and domain names.

Domain Name System (DNS)

• DNS is a critical web protocol acting as the Internet's directory, mapping human-readable domain names to IP addresses.

• The computer knows how to reach an IP address but not the domain name itself.

• When accessing a website, the computer performs a DNS lookup to find the IP address corresponding to the typed domain name.

• If accessing via IP address works but not the domain name, there may be a DNS configuration issue in the network.

Importance in IT

• Understanding IP addresses is valuable for diagnosing issues in Internet requests and server logs.

• Proper IP address configuration is essential for IT infrastructure functionality.

• DNS is a vast system that warrants further discussion in later lessons.