Networking Committee · Interactive lesson
See what happens after you press Enter.
Follow one request from your browser, across the internet, into a web server, and all the way back to a rendered page.
The whole journey
Request → response in eight stages
Zoom in
Explore the smaller processes
Name → IP address
DNS works like a distributed phone book.
Your browser needs an IP address before it can contact a website. A cached answer may return immediately; otherwise a resolver asks several name servers.
Reliable + encrypted
Choose a connection strategy.
Traditional HTTPS commonly uses TCP followed by TLS. HTTP/3 uses QUIC, which combines secure transport over UDP and can reduce setup work.
Request Header
GET /learn HTTP/2
Host: example.com
Accept: text/html
Accept-Encoding: gzip, br
User-Agent: StudentBrowser/1.0
Cookie: session=••••••Response Header
200 OK
Content-Type: text/html
Content-Encoding: br
Cache-Control: max-age=3600
Content-Length: 18432
<!doctype html>…Bytes → pixels
The browser still has work to do.
HTML, CSS, and JavaScript are parsed and combined before pixels appear. Some resources can block or delay the first render.
Inside the trip
One message becomes many packets
Large messages are split into smaller numbered pieces. Routers forward each packet independently, and the destination puts them back in order.
Simplified model: splits payloads into 4 KB transport chunks.
Knowledge check
Can you put the journey in order?
Click the stages from first to last. You can retry as many times as you need.