🧠 Knowledge Series #19: How the web actually works

And what happens when you type an address into the browser? DNS, HTTPS and more explained

🔒The Knowledge Series is a collection of easy to read guides designed to help you plug the gaps in your tech knowledge so that you feel more confident when chatting to colleagues. Clearly explained in plain English. One topic at a time.

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Hi product people 👋,

When we're building products, we spend our days doing one thing so natural that we don't ever really think about it: typing web addresses into a browser. But if you ask someone what really happens when a web address is typed into a browser, few people know-or care.

And that’s a perfectly reasonable position for most people; if the web just works, why bother trying to understand how it works? But for the people who are actually building products, I’d argue that understanding how the web works at basic level is a helpful piece of knowledge to have because it can help you to join the dots between other concepts, too. 

If you know a browser uses HTTP requests, it’ll make reading API documentation easier since APIs use HTTP requests, too.

If you know that browsers parse front end code, it’ll help you to understand front end development and empathise with front end teams when they explain why something could take weeks, not days, to build.

If you know a bit about cookies and caching, you’ll be more informed to implement accurate data privacy policies.

Coming up in this Knowledge Series:

• The evolving nature of the web

• How a browser actually works

• DNS records explained

• Understanding requests and responses

• Caching and other concepts worth knowing about

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The Knowledge Series

The evolution of the web - a quick recap

Thanks to the implosion of crypto, the so-called ‘Web3’ narrative recently died a rather sudden death. But despite the negative connotations associated with Web3, it’s still helpful for us to think about the different evolutionary steps the web has been through over the past few decades.