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

[Seth Chromick]

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?

Thanks for answering my dumb question / Sorry for asking a dumb, most 
likely previously answered question :)