[wp-hackers] The life and times of an HTTP request

[Tim Kissane]

Seth Chromick wrote:

> Assumption #1: If I'm using pretty permalinks, my .htaccess file is 
> telling the server to route every HTTP request to the index.php
>   
> Assumption #2: Because of #1, this includes all HTTP requests for style 
> sheets, javascript files, images, etc.
>   
> After  using Google, and Google site: search on the wp-hackers mailing 
> list archive, I couldn't find a sufficient answer... I've leapfrogged 
> through the WordPress source, starting at the index, working my way to 
> parse_request() inside the WP() class, followed through send_headers(), 
> but I'm missing the elephant in the room: How/where does WordPress 
> retrieve and send those files back to the web browser?
>   

Just to be clear, the web server (Apache, IIS, whatever) sends
a response to the web browser, not WordPress.
The .htaccess files work in concert with the web server and
are independent of whatever files or scripts exist in the directory
where they reside.

Tim K.