// what is the web?
The web is a system of documents and applications connected by links, running on a global network of computers. When you type a URL into a browser, you're asking a computer somewhere in the world to send you a file. Your browser reads that file and turns it into what you see on screen.
It sounds simple. The scale is not. There are over 1.9 billion websites on the web today. About 200 million of them are active. Every second, roughly 2.5 million emails are sent, 100,000 YouTube videos are watched, and 70,000 Google searches are made.
Key idea: The web is not the internet. The internet is the physical network — cables, routers, servers. The web is one thing that runs on top of it. Email, gaming, streaming — those also run on the internet but are not the web.
// how a url becomes a page
You type antcpu.com into your browser. Here's what happens in under 200 milliseconds:
1. DNS lookup — your browser asks a DNS server "what IP address is antcpu.com?" It gets back a number like 217.160.0.1.
2. TCP connection — your browser connects to that IP address on port 443 (HTTPS).
3. HTTP request — your browser sends a request: "give me the file at /"
4. Server response — the server sends back an HTML file.
5. Render — your browser reads the HTML, fetches any CSS and JS files it references, and paints the page on your screen.
Open any webpage. Right-click anywhere and choose "Inspect" or "View Page Source". What you see is the raw HTML the server sent. That's the actual file your browser is reading right now.
// the web today
The web in 2026 is not what it was in 2000. Pages are now applications. A single page can run a full video editor, a 3D game, a real-time collaboration tool. The browser has become the most powerful application platform ever built.
And it's still built on the same three technologies it always was — HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. Everything else is built on top of those three.
Go to internetlivestats.com and watch it for 60 seconds. Then open any webpage, right-click, and choose View Page Source. You're looking at the raw HTML of a live website. That's what this course teaches you to write.