Nora TindallSep 11, 2023

Let's do an experiment! If you're *not* a professional or habitual programmer, I'd love to hear what you know about what happens between typing a web address like "example.com" into your web browser and actually seeing the page show up. Whatever level of abstraction and verbosity you're comfortable with.

Tech folks: absolutely no making fun of people for being wrong, okay? People are allowed to not know stuff!

Boosts appreciated, but only if you're interested in frivolity 💜

Show threadMatt McIrvinSep 11, 2023
@noracodes I'm a programmer and I think I could give a 10,000 foot view of what happened when you did this in 1996, but there's so much extra magic in there now since they got rid of an independent search bar that I might second-guess myself.
Show threadBen RamseyMar 28, 2025
@mattmcirvin @noracodes At the network level, it hasn’t changed all that much.
Show threadBoyd Stephen Smith Jr.Mar 28, 2025

@ramsey @mattmcirvin @noracodes Didn't we switch to UDP for HTTP 3 ? That seems like a big shift from TCP.

Something about merging TLS session carry-over into the 3-way handshake?

I still write most of my web stuff like I was using SSL 1.0 and am constantly flummoxed by CORS.

Show threadBen RamseyMar 28, 2025
@BoydStephenSmithJr @mattmcirvin @noracodes I was thinking primarily about the DNS and TCP/IP level.
Show threadMatt McIrvin

@ramsey @BoydStephenSmithJr @noracodes Yeah, that's not so different, but there's so much more *of* it.

In the 90s we used to make fun of people whose way of just going to a URL was opening Yahoo!, typing it into the search bar and following a link that came back, but that's not so far from what everyone is doing now.

Mar 29, 2025 at 12:38pmWeb