Welcome back people. If you've followed my html lessons, then by now you should have a basic understanding of how to create and design basic webpages.

A web page however, is not much use as a webpage unless it's on the web, so in this lesson we're going to have a look at what exactly the web actually is.

the local machine

Up until now, you've been creating, saving and viewing your html pages on the hard drive of the computer that you are sitting at while doing so. Whether that computer be your own pc at home, a laptop, a pc at a library, an internet cafe or at work, we refer to this computer as your "local" computer, or if yu want to step your vocab up one more notch towards talking like a geek, we call it your "local machine". If you get into some more advanced prgramming, you'll also come accross the term "localhost".

So in a nutshell, the word local refers to the machine you are physically situated at.

the internet

So what and where is the internet?

The internet, otherwise known as "the net", "the web", or "the world wide web(www)" has no fixed location.

Rather it is a network, or a web of millions of interconnected computers all over the world.

When we connect to the internet on our local computer and we go to(or browse) a website, our local machine is establishing a connection with one of those computers. Our browser(usually something like internet explorer or firefox) sends a request to the particular computer somewhere that holds all the files that make up the webpage we are trying to view.

If successful, that computer then sends the requested information back to our local machine where our browser dowloads and interprets the necessary files so that we can view the webpage on the monitor of our local machine.

In our next lesson, we'll discuss servers, click here to continue.

Lesson added Saturday 9th August 2008