How the Internet works

The Internet has become a critical infrastructure piece for many of today's brick & mortar businesses and even become the sole infrastructure piece for today's Internet-only businesses. For most people, how the Internet works is not as important as being able to click the "Order" button on a web site or blast a tweet from their cell phone. Most importantly, they don't need to know all the gory details but an understanding of what happens can make them better prepared to handle problems by themselves or communicate issues more effectively to others.
If you haven't already read my articles on proxies and DNS, please go read them. I'll wait for you.

Web browsing

There are literally thousands of technologies that operate over the Internet but we'll focus on the web browser, as it is the poster child for the Internet and is the most used end-user consumer technology. Web browsing is a combination of many technologies - protocols and standards that cover how systems talk to each other, how information is encoded in different languages, how data is accessed and even how it's presented. We'll take a top-down approach, breaking each one down a bit.

URLs

The Uniform Resource Locator, or URL for short, is how you identify information on the Internet. Its a mailing address for something on the Internet, be it a graphic image, a movie, a text document or something else.