Web Browsers OpenFAQ

How does a web browser work?

Contributors:

A web browser (sometimes called a "user agent") works by using a special protocol called HTTP to request a specially encoded text document from a web server. The text document contains special instructions (written in HTML) that tell the browser how to display the document on the user's screen.

The instructions may include references (hyper-links) to other web pages, text color and position, locations for various images contained in the document and where to position them. Some web pages may use layout instructions contained in seperate documents called stylesheets.

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Bill Triplett
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