A website can be likened to geological layers or the layers of soil—in describing the physical components of a website and how it’s built

The web isn’t a uniform system developed by a centralized team, it’s patchwork.

Each piece of the web as we know it today was built separately, where unrelated individuals and developers have added layer upon layer, each one building on top of pre-existing systems and protocols.

The foundation, or the bedrock, began with the establishment of the internet.

This foundation slowly gained layers like URLs, HTTP, HTML, and a bunch of other acronyms.

This layered metaphor is how most developers see webpages—a set of stacked systems to use, connect and expand, patching together a set of different features. A data layer, a security layer, a visual design layer—all of these are hidden “beneath the soil surface” and are invisible to the end user.