Clients, servers & the browser

Clients, servers & the browser

When you visit a site, your browser (the client) sends a request over the internet to a server, which sends back files — HTML, CSS, JavaScript, images. The browser turns those files into the page you see.

This request/response cycle is the heart of the web. Understand it and everything else — hosting, APIs, debugging — starts to make sense.

Key points

• The browser is the client; it requests pages from a server.
• The server sends back files; the browser renders them.
• This request/response cycle underpins the whole web.

Try it: open your browser's DevTools (F12) → Network tab, reload a page, and watch the requests.