Do You Know the Difference Between a Web Browser, Web Page, Website, and Web Server?
Make sure you never mix up these common terms again
As the web continues to expand into every area of our daily lives, one would hope that this expansion would be met by an equal expansion of internet-related education. Sadly, this match in growth has largely not been the case. Web-related knowledge is largely sidelined, found in optional high school elective classes or reserved for Computer Science majors. As a result, when it comes to the internet and tech terminology, misconceptions abound.
Web pages, web sites, web servers, and web browsers are a group of related topics that are frequently thrown around without a proper understanding of the uses for and differences between each subject.
Today I want to give an overview of each topic that will serve as a starting point thorough enough to leave you feeling knowledgable and empowered to speak a little more confidently about how these parts of the world wide web work. Let’s dive in.
Web Browser
As the name implies, a web browser is a software application used to browse the World Wide Web. In fact, browsing the web requires a web browser. When you type a URL into a browser and hit enter, you are requesting to visit a specific web address indicated by the URL.
The web browser retrieves the requested data from the web server that the website is hosted on. The data is written in HTML (Hypertext Markup Language), which the browser uses as a blueprint to begin building a web page. Once all the data has been retrieved successfully, your browser will have built a full web page seen on your device.
A web browser and a search engine are two different things. A search engine (such as Google) is just a website used to search for other websites. As of this writing, the most popular web browsers are Chrome, Safari, and Firefox (in descending order).
Web Page
A web page is a document most often written in HTML and also often including CSS (Cascading Style Sheets) and JavaScript. This document is accessed by entering its URL address into a browser.
Your web browser reads the document and translates it, rendering the translated web page on your device. A web page may contain various types of information such as text, images, audio, and video.
When properly designed, a web page can be used by people with disabilities. Web developers can provide alternative text for images, making information available to those who are blind, or transcripts for audio to provide access for those who are deaf or hard of hearing.
Website
A website is a collection of web pages usually collected under a common domain name. What is often generally referred to as a “website” is usually more specifically the home page of a website.
For example, www.medium.com would take you to Medium’s home page, where you can access the many other web pages that together make up the Medium website. As of 2019, there are almost 2 billion websites on the Web.
Web Server
The primary function of a web server is to store, process and deliver web pages. A web server is composed of two aspects, hardware, and software. The software side determines how users access web pages stored on the webserver (URLs, HTTP, etc).
The hardware side encompasses the fact that the webserver is a physical computer, storing both its own operating software as well as all files belonging to the websites that are hosted on that particular server.
A web server delivers web pages but can also receive data from clients (aka users) such as when you create a profile on a website. A common misconception is the idea that a website can stop responding. Remember, a website is simply a collection of web pages. If a user runs into trouble accessing a website, this usually means that the web server which that a particular website is hosted on is having trouble, not the website itself.
Going to The Movies -A Summary Analogy
Let’s say you want to go to the movies. You can think of a web browser as your form of transportation, be it a car, a bus, a train, etc. Assuming that you don’t live at the movie theatre, you must have a form of transportation in order to get there. Similarly, you must have a web browser in order to access the web.
You can think of the movie theatre as a website. Like a movie theatre, a website has a specific address (a web address) that you must go to using your car or another form of transportation (your web browser).
Once you arrive at the movie theatre, there will be many different screens showing many different movies. In the same way, a website is made up of many different web pages which each have their own unique content.
And lastly, a movie theatre must get movies from somewhere. They request them from a distributor, stationed at a different location. This distributor receives the request and sends a copy of the movie they desire. Similarly, a web browser requests data from a web server and that transfer of data is what allows you to access a website and its web pages.
