This is purely out of curiosity. But if I were to type in the IP of a website, would the request still go through the forward lookup process? If not, at what point and by which step is it realized that this is the location by IP and not a hostname as a string?
Also, how would this be recorded in my hostfile? If it goes through the entire lookup process, will the hostfile contain the string hostname as well as the IP and populate locally?
2001:feed:face:dead::beef:8080
is an IPv6 address with a specified port and not just a really badly formatted URL... ;)