The Rendering Spectrum: Client-Side, Server-Side, and Everything in Between

You open your browser , type www.myshop.com , and press Enter . After a moment , you see a page with a navbar , a product list , images and a footer. SImple, right ?? But let me ask you something : what actually had to happen for this page to appear on your screen ? There are many parties envolved and many things are happening , so lets not try to answer it all at once. Let's start with what we can figure out without any technical knowledge, just by thinking and doing small experiments. 1: The Browser has to to something what you see on the screen is shown by the browser. That much is clear. So the broswser is definitely plays a role ( we will see what it does exactly later ). 2. Is the browser enough ?? Now a fair question : can we say the browser has everything needed to show this page ? it's not impossible. A browser is one of the most advanced and powerful piece of software, so maybe it already has all the products , images and everything else inside it . What do you think ?? If your answer is no , good. If your answer is yes , then let me disappoint you with a simple experiment. Turn off your wifi. Open a new tab in incognito window and type www.myshop.com( this is a fake site , you can open any site you want to ) and press Enter . Instead of the shop , you will see an error page or something like - "No internet connection" . The same browser , the same url but a very different result . The thing that changed is internet. So the browser itself is not enough . The internet is also there doing something or helping in doing something . Now Internet in itself is a very broad topic and we need to discuss about it in detail to understand what actually internet is doing but since the topic of this article is something else we have to know this -> internet is only a medium here . So whatever is coming in your browser after entering the url is stored somewhere else and handled by something else . The internet is only playing the role in connecting your browser to that something which has that data which your browser need to show you something on your screen . So we have to know that something is and what that soemthing is doing . Now, the internet is a huge topic on its own, and understanding what actually happens inside it would take us into DNS , routes , IP addresses , TCP , HTTP and many other things .That's not what we are trying to understand right now. For the moment, let's keep it simple : Think of internet as the medium that allows our browser to communicate with something outside our computer. When we type www.myshop.com, the browser somehow communicates through the internet with something that can provide the things browser needs. And this gives us our next question : What is on the other side ?? There has to be something out there that can receive what our browser is asking for and send something back . We haven't seen it yet. We don't know where it is, what it looks like or what exactly it does. But we can already deduce one thing : Our browser is not working alone. There is something on the other side of the connection. So let's try to figure out what that something is and its properties. first it should be understand what browser wants ( better to say that something need to be smart enough to understand the request made by the browser ) . Then it also has to send something in response so that browser can get that specific thing it is requesting. SO we can say it's a kind of computer ( as it is storing data and able to take a input and then return a output accordingly ) , but a diffrent kind of computer . One who is always running ( as any browser across the world can request something from him anytime ) . Diffrent also in a way that we can communicate to it using a url ( www.myshop.com ) . We name this computer server. At its simplest, a server is a computer or system that provides something to other computers when they ask for it. Now since server is also a computer , it also has memory , storage , processor and things which computer has . But we are calling it server because it is special in its role or working . ( Now its your time to go and surf and discover what server is actually , ow can a normal computer can be configured to make a server and how is server able to understand the request send by the browser and other details ). Now that we know the players -> browser , internet and server , we can ask a very important question: When the browser asks the server for www.myshop.com, what exactly does the server send back? does it send html ?? or javascript ?? images , videos ?? css and other stuff ??