What happens when you open a website
Name, number, request, response. What happens in the second between pressing enter and seeing a page.
The problem,
and the picture.
The brief
Every developer interview asks it, and most answers are a list of acronyms. The film had to make the DNS lookup chain visible.
The approach
A laptop asks for a name. The lookup is drawn as a network that grows one server at a time: resolver, root server, .com server, the site's own name server. Then the web server answers with HTML and the page draws itself.
- FieldComputing
- Runtime0:59
- Made forStudio sample
- SourceCloudflare Learning Center
- SourceMDN Web Docs
The narration.
You type a web address and press enter. Less than a second later, the page appears. Here's what happens in between. Computers don't find each other by name. They use numbers, called IP addresses. So first, your browser needs the number behind the name. If it hasn't looked it up recently, it asks a DNS resolver. The resolver asks a root server, which points it to the server for dot com. That server points to the website's own name server, which finally replies with the IP address. Now your browser connects to that address and sends a request: please send me this page. The web server sends back the HTML, the page's instructions. Your browser reads them, fetches the images and styles, and draws the page. Name, number, request, response. That's how a website loads.