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Wife: How does it work? Ryan: The web? Wife: Yeah. Ryan: Hmm. Well, it’s all pretty amazing really. And the funny thing is that it’s all very undervalued. Th
by kenjackson 15y ago
Wife: How does it work?
Ryan: The web?
Wife: Yeah.
Ryan: Hmm. Well, it’s all pretty amazing really. And the funny thing is that it’s all very undervalued. The protocol I was talking about, HTTP, it’s capable of all sorts of neat stuff that people ignore for some reason.
Wife: You mean http like the beginning of what I type into the browser?
Ryan: Yeah. That first part tells the browser what protocol to use. That stuff you type in there is one of the most important breakthroughs in the history of computing.
Ryan went down a completely different path than I would have. I don't think most people who ask how the web works care about the http protocol. At least I wouldn't, if I didn't know better. I think I'd be more interested in how the network infrastructure is laid out and how requests get from my computer to a server and the data back and rendered. http is really just an implementation detail (people did this far before http existed).
- gitah 15y agoWell what you're talking about is the Internet and the TCP/IP stack. The World Wide Web is an application that runs on the Internet. To describe the Internet when someone asks how the web works would be like describing how the iOS works when someone is curious about a specific app.
- kenjackson 15y agoWell no. Part of the web is the internet. You can't skip the internet and talk about resource representation caching in REST. But I am talking about the web -- that's why I mentioned how pages are rendered. HTTP and HTML, while both are fundamental to the web, are also just implementation details. HTTP has evolved a fair bit since its inception for the web (there was no PUT or POST, for example). To take your analogy, it would be like describing Cocoa library when your wife asks how an app works.