(Teacherjh) writes:

When you connect to the internet, your computer connects to another computer
that's already connected and will provide you internet services. That is your
server.

I'd call that my ISP, gateway, router, ... but not "server".

When you request a web page, the request goes to the server. If the server has
never seen this page before, the server sends the request on down the line to
other computers connected to the internet (in a rational order) until it finds
the source, which (of course) has seen this page before.

What world are we in here? You're talking about a string of
(transparent) caching proxy servers? They communicate "in a rational
order"? So this is something like a SquidCache system?

There's very little that's truly "standard" about caching HTTP proxies.
Such broad generalizations make me cringe.

'course AOL is different. But AOL is not "the Internet".

--kyler