Summarizing The Browser: Depths Of Web Development

To have a modern-day successful website is impossible without client-side scripting. Everything the user sees, clicks, and interacts with on the website is the work of front-end development. To make the website interactive for the users, web developers use client-side scripting and framework languages like HTML, JavaScript, CSS, and framework libraries like Moo Tools, Dojo Tools.

All websites run on three different components - the client-side, the server-side scripting and the database. The client-side scripting is mainly targeted at how the user, or the client, is using the browser to see the website. Naturally, this becomes one of the most important elements in web-development, since eye-appealing and interactive websites can be the drive why clients stay longer or buy products on the digital marketplace.

Traffic is vital to keep the website going, and user interface design can be one of the main reasons to influx it. When people are drawn to the website that is designed professionally, they are more likely to stay there for a while until they get what they came for. If the experience on the website was pleasing, they are more likely to become loyal visitors or customers and recommend it to their friends.

Having in mind that the internet is flooded with various types of pages offering almost every possible service in the world, it is essential to know what tools are recommended to use to make your website stand out of the crowd.

How Do Browsers Work?

Nowadays, there are dozens of browsers to choose from but some made a name for themselves. The major browsers are Chrome, Firefox, Opera, Safari, and Internet Explorer. Web browser’s main function is to present the web resources you choose by requesting the information from the server and displaying it in the chosen browsers window. The resource may differ from time to time, but mostly it is an HTML code, a PDF file, image, video, or some other kind of content you choose to see.

What web browsers do is they interpret and display HTML files the way that the codes specifically tell them to by having CSS or HTML code specifications. These specifications are maintained by the World Wide Web Consortium, or W3C shortened. This is the organization that sets standards for the web.

To understand how the browser works, it is better to have an insight into its structure:

• The engine of the browser - controls the actions of the rendering engine and user interface.
• User interface - everything that the user sees in the browser. It’s address bar, home/back/forward buttons, bookmarks, etc.
• Rendering engine - displays the requested content from the server. Different internet browsers use different rendering engines. For example - Google Chrome and Opera use Blink (a fork of WebKit), FireFox uses Gecko, Safari - WebKit and Internet Explorer uses Trident.
• User interface back-end - responsible for the basic drawing of the objects like boxes, panels, windows.
• Networking - calls HTTP requests using different implementations for different platforms behind a platform-independent interface.
• Data storage - a persistence layer. It helps to store all kinds of data locally, for example, cookies and cache. Browsers also support the storage of mechanisms like localStorage, WebSQL, FileSystem, and IndexedDB.

The main flow of the browser begins by rendering the engine getting the files from the requested documents from the networking layer. Later on, the rendering engine will start parsing the HTML document and convert components to DOM nodes. The engine will parse the style data in external CSS files and in style details. Styling element information together with visual in the HTML will be used to create a render tree.

Following more information on the render tree, it contains rectangles with visual attributes like colors and dimensions. They are placed in the order to be displayed on the screen. After the render tree construction is done, the following process is to go through the layout. This means, that every node needs to be placed in a certain coordinate of the screen. The next thing on the list is painting the render tree, that will be traversed and each node will be painted using the UI backend layer. To enable even better user experience on the website, the rendering engine begins displaying elements on the screen as soon as possible, while some of the other content parts are still coming from the network.

Server-Side Fundamentals

A back-end developer is a mastermind behind the internal elements of the web applications, it’s architecture, and software logic. The basic idea of server-side development is servers, that are hardware and storage devices, are connected to the user's computer through a working internet connection. The bigger the application, the bigger will be the amount of data that has to be stored in the back-end and accessed through servers to present it in a certain format in the browser.

The protocol that defines the process of data transferring between client-side and server-side scripting is called HyperTextTransferProtocol (HTTP). When a certain keyword is written in the search bar in the browser, an HTTP request with a URL is sent to the server. After that, the server either responds with the content that is requested or presents an error.

After the HTML page is returned for a search query, it is rendered by the web browser. While decompressing the response from the server, the browser may discover other links to resources and send separate HTTP requests to download those files.

Debugging with Chrome DevTools

Using debugging tools on your web applications is a great way to understand what is happening in it. The debugger can quickly show you what is the main problem of the bug, and give a better insight into how the application is performing. If the first correction of the bug is invalid, dev tools provide an opportunity to dig even deeper to find out what is the cause of the bug.

Chrome DevTools is one of the best friends to a web developer. These tools have a lot of possibilities that come along with the experience of developing but lets briefly describe some of the most important. DevTools save a lot of time by allowing to manipulate the code in the browser, which follows with a possibility to quickly debug styling or other issues and bring new ideas to life.

It does not matter if you are a beginner or an expert on web developing – Chrome DevTools can be super useful to each mentioned group. For beginners, it is important to make themselves comfortable with the devtools at the very beginning. The sooner you’ll start to understand it - the sooner you’ll progress. It can significantly improve the process of learning JavaScript, HTML, and CSS. For advanced developers - it can be a great tool to prototype small modules, features, etc.

Conclusion

The growing demand for developers is undeniable. Technology is reinventing itself every minute and most of the companies seek to provide the best experience for their customers. To obtain the best result, client-side and server-side developers are vital. Although these professions seem to be desired by many computer science beginners, one out scales them both.

If you’re a front-end or a back-end developer, you’re probably seeking the full-stack knowledge. It’s the combination of both front and back end development, and it’s the highest form of it. Obviously, it might be overwhelming trying to master both sides of development, therefore courses and online learning paths can be time-savers. Become a wanted employee for modern companies today, and help them provide the best experience for their users by masters the development tools.