A colleague writes, can you give me a hint on how the server figures out how to fire up its first page? I answer his question after first writing More About the Server.
Yes, consider a page request like this entered into the browser's location bar.
stack.fed.wiki/syndicating-pages-with-rss.html
This is where the server handles this request.
This request handler knows that the client-side is not yet running so it delivers an html page that will load up all the javascript which will eventually wake up here:
At this point the html has only mentioned the wiki pages by name in a div for that purpose. The important loop finds those divs and refreshes them by fetching json and more javascript for plugins.
<section class='main'> <div class='page' id='syndicating-pages-with-rss'> <div class='paper'> </div> </div> </section>
You can see this bootstrap with the browser’s Show Source. Here there is one page but their could be many.