When you hear the terms World Wide Web or

Internet, you might think of something that's highly connected.

As a spiderweb or fishing net needs to be in order to be effective.

Online, the web of the Internet is spun by what are called hyperlinks.

Today we've shortened that to simply links.

And we have a technical term for that in the browser.

They're called anchors.

We reviewed how anchors are created in HTML, so

let's now look at how they're related to HTTP requests.

Okay, I'm back in Chrome and I'm gonna navigate to httpbin.org.

On this page you see a long list of blue anchors and

clicking on each will take you to the linked page.

Remember, that destination is determined by the URL listed

in the href attribute of the anchor.

To show you more about Chrome Developer tools let's right click the html anchor

and choose Inspect Element.

So I'll scroll down to that /html resource and I'll right-click and choose Inspect.

What we see here is the original html that the browser used to produce, or

render, this anchor.

Notice it has an href attribute with the value /html.

This href value is the URL that the browser

uses to make a request to the destination.

Now you might think, this looks like a URI, Chris, not a URL.

Well, I'd agree with you that it looks that way.

But this is what's called a relative URL,

which means the URL listed is relative to the current URL.

If we look up top at our browser's address bar right here,

we see httpbin.org as the current URL.

So this /html down here is relative to that httpbin.org URL.

And the full URL would translate to

http://httpbin.org/html.

It's worth noting that modern browsers will hide the protocol from the address

bar if it's plain http.

Notice in Chrome I do not see http:// here.

So what happens when we click on the anchor?

Well, only one way to find out.

After clicking on it, the browser navigates to that page.

And what you see if you click on the Network tab is that by

clicking on the anchor your browser made an http GET request.

If I expand this I see the request method was a GET request

using the URL from the href attribute of the anchor, /html.

Let's put this all together.

When viewing the page http://httpbin.org

you saw a link on the page that said /html.

This link was created with an html anchor tag where the href

attribute's value is /html.

Remember that's a relative URL and the text displayed is also /html.

Upon clicking on that link the browser used the relative

URL from the href attribute and combined it with the URL

of the current page to construct a full URL of the destination.

This full URL is known as an absolute URL.

With the absolute URLs,

your browser has everything it needs to construct the http request.

Your browser makes a network connection to httpbin.org using port 80,

kinda like we did in Telnet, then sends a GET request for

the /html resource using HTTP/1.1.

It adds a bunch of headers according to the kind of content that are acceptable,

the type of device making the request, Chrome in our case,

the page that we're currently on, and among others, the language we prefer.

English in this case, though this is determined by your browser settings.

And that's what happens every time you click a standard HTML anchor in a browser.

That was a fancy illustration of something that's quite simple.

Clicking on an HTML anchor in a browser results in an http GET request

to the resource located at the URL specified in the anchor's href attribute.

I should tell you that only GET requests are made with these anchors, and

not post requests.

We'll see later how post requests can be made with a browser.