At a high level, when you click on a link, your browser and operating system figure out where you've clicked. The web page that you're viewing has hidden information associated with whatever you clicked on. That's called a Uniform resource locator (URL). That indicates the next web page that you want to view. Embedded inside of the URL is the name of the web site that holds the page that you've asked for. Your browser takes that URL, breaks out the name of the web site, and then uses the Domain Name System (DNS) to get an Internet Protocol (IP) address for the site. Your browser then opens a Transmission Control Protocol (TCP) connection to the web site over IP. It asks to speak to the Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP) server (or, for secure connections, HTTPS) which then provides the next web page in HyperText Markup Language (HTML) that your browser renders.