[kevstev]

Completely agree, and its very telling almost immediately in these types of questions how technical you are. If you say "it asks the webserver for a webpage" in almost all cases there is a superficial knowledge compared to someone who opens with "a DNS resolution request is made to get the IP of the server, then we send an HTTP get request to that server with a URL..." and from there we can dive in to how DNS works, how TCP/IP works, what a typical webserver does, what are the http verbs, etc...

With the first type of response, when you follow up with how do we know where the webserver is, there is usually uncertainty. The whole point of open ended questions is to understand where your technical understanding is, not to hit a bunch of keywords on the way. This type of question though is way outside the norm though, I think it is a misunderstanding on the interviewee's part if they think this is an exercise in saying specific terms. I can see how its potentially more frustrating- there is no pass/fail, just how well did you do on a scale that is a bit subjective.