Just imagine if all your friends will call each other passport numbers instead of names sounds very complicated? The same thought Jon Postel, Paul Mockapetris who invented the domain names, or shorter domains. The only difference between regular persons' name and domain name is that domain name is unique all other the world. Just imagine if there are even two James among your friends and your friend told you 'James has new game and he could share it with you', how you will identify to whom you have to call to play new game this evening? The same - domain name should be unique.


All domains names are associated with ONE unique IP address. The organization that is in charge of such associations is called Domain Name Server (DNS). For example domain google.com is associated with 74.125.87.99, yahoo.com with - 209.191.93.53, bing.com with - 64.4.8.147.

• Lesson 2: How Internet Browser opens a web site
• Lesson 2.1: What is web site and web page?
• Lesson 2.2: What is server and IP address?
• Lesson 2.3: What is domain name?

Thanks for you post and notice

You are absolutely right, but the problem is that we are trying to keep our articles easy to understand. The examples you have mentioned are a bit more complicated and difficult for us to explain for beginner users.

The big companies like Microsoft, Google, Yahoo and others are exceptions, since they spread their users’ requests among different servers BUT in all cased the first request is still sent to the same server There are several ways how to do that:
 
May be you payed attention that when you are trying to open google.com web site you could be redirected to google.fr or google.co.uk, which are country based. OR may be you notices that most social networks have lots of sub domains (srv1.example.com, srv2.example.com, img.example.com) which are located on different IPs.

Also there is more complicated way (hidden from user) to spread traffic among different servers: the domain’s IP is determined by DNS server, who selects the server with lowest load at the current time. That means: if you will ping microsoft.com web site from different countries or on different time you will get different IP addresses

Here is the trick if you will request google.com web site (that domain is taken just an example) your request could be forwarded to different IPs all the time. BUT if you like on of their servers then you can force you browser to request google.com web site from that particular server. All you need is to use IP instead of domain name http://209.85.129.103

Case you have more questions pleas ask

Thanks for your remark but JavaScript and HTML is a bit different thing. The first one is client side programming language and second is just text formating language. The first one is used when web site require to modify something on page without making request to servers. The good example of JavaScript usage is then you have a web form. Before you will send form's contents to the server it is good idea to check if he/she filled all fields (and they are correct, for example email field should contain @ char). As for HTML that is just a language which allows you to format TEXT. When you can see bold or italic text, red or blue links or even images, to arrange all this info on a page you need some kind of instructions. Otherwise how web browser likes: IE, Firefox, Opera, Safari or Chrome would be able to display everything in the way you wish?