So I get to the Web Developer tool, then what? I know the activity says to look for traffic, how do I read the traffic? Don’t get it! Do you open up the tool, then type in a website? Then what? You look at a bunch of numbers. What do the numbers and columns mean.
There is discussion and some useful tips in another thread on the forum. I hope this helps.
Thank you, I did see that, but I don’t know what the columns or the numbers in the columns mean. I went directly to certain websites and went to the developer tools that way. Is this the same?
Yes, each time you open a new page, you will have to re-open the developer tools tab. You can also refresh the page to see the messages coming as the page loads. I asked my students to notice that everything they see is text (there is no binary). This is the top layer of the internet and how all the textual information is getting transmitted is an abstraction that the browser does not care about. Also, I asked students to notice how different elements of the page (videos, text, images, etc) were individual requests being sent and they were coming from different locations on the web. When you look at the console tab you will see some Post messages too. The lesson also talks about status codes that the browser receives. Those the numbers you see in the Network tab in the status columns.
I don’t spend too much time on this. I just use this to show things that we have been talking about in this unit. The hard part is that the developer tools display has changed each time I have taught this lesson. In the first year, I was able to actually see all the GET and POST requests, but now I only see the POST requests. I hope this helps somewhat.