NWE Help: Web: Intro: URL Explanation

NWE Home :: Help :: Web :: Intro

Web addresses are a form of URL -- that's Uniform Resource Locator. Supposedly, a URL provides access to one resource (file or page) only, and provides it from any location on the Net (and it does work most of the time). Let's dissect some URLs and find out what they mean. (You don't need to memorize this, but we think it will help you understand the Web a bit better.)

Every URL is of the type

     protocol://computername/directory/filename.type

So for the NWE home page (http://www.nwe.ufl.edu/writing/index.html)

• The protocol is whatever occurs before the :// (colon-slash-slash). In this case it's http -- hypertext transfer protocol. This is the standard web protocol. Other protocols are telnet, ssh, nntp, ftp, file, and gopher.
• The computer name is the content before the third slash. In this case, it's www.nwe.ufl.edu.
• The directory is whatever occurs from the end of the computer name to the last slash. For the NWE, the directory is writing, also called "slash-writing" since it's one of the top directories.
• The last bit at the right is the filename and type. Sometimes the type isn't obvious from the name, but in most cases it's one of the standard file types. In this case, it's index.html--a regular HTML file.

A few things to remember:

• There are no back-slashes in URLs, only forward-slashes. But don't say "forward-slash"--just say "slash."
• Everything after the third slash in a URLs is case sensitive. That's right: http://eff.org/INDEX.HTML is not the same as http://eff.org/index.html. Generally speaking, you should type URLs in lower case.

Here are some more URLs: