It's amazing how much detail is required to fully answer that question... and it comes right down to the hardware that browser is on. I think most of the time

It's amazing how much detail is required to fully answer that question... and it comes right down to the hardware that browser is on. I think most of the time when people ask this question, they're really only looking for a protocol level answer, they're not looking at you getting into the nitty gritty of comms signals and the 7 layer OSI model and BGP and frame relay protocols. Some layers are more fascinating than others...and depending on who you're talking to, the level of focus you give each layer can vary. But you could quite easily drown someone with information. The tragedy of this is that you kind of need to understand the big picture before any of the details become clear. In much the same way you learn the detail of math without ever understanding the big picture and consequently a lot of people fail to feel good at math because they just don't get it. It's not until you have sufficient vocabulary until the grammar becomes clear. It's easier to learn the web than math from the top down because all the pieces are reasonably easy to interact with and there are easy to obtain tools to allow you to pick apart just about everything to help you understand what is going on under the covers... except for the BaseBand radio on your cell phone, that's a virtual black box that the phone manufacturers don't want you picking apart. Tools for this are beginning to become available as hackers manage to find ways to reverse engineer them too.