web dev part 2: URL's

URL's

Everything available on the World Wide Web has a unique location. This is referred to as a Uniform Resource Locator (URL). It is the URL that you type in when you want to go to a web page.

For instance, the URL of this page is "https://harryknight.tripod.com/webdev/part2.htm"

Let's break this puppy down into some easily digestible parts:

"http://" - this is a clue to the browser that we are looking for a web page (or, more properly, an HTML document.) (Click here for the Full Monty.)

"harryknight.tripod.com" - This is the domain. The domain refers to which computer you are looking for. For example, when you go to "www.franklin.edu", you are essentially telling the browser to go to the computer that has been labeled "www.franklin.edu." In the example we have been using, "harryknight" is actually a subdomain of the domain "tripod". A subdomain is a section of a domain that has been set aside for a web site. Another example of a subdomain style web site is "www.cs.franklin.edu". In this case, "cs" is a subdomain of franklin.edu. The ".com" (or ".edu", ".gov", ".cc", etc.) refers to what type of site this is. "Com" (commercial) indicates that this site is trying to sell you something (hence the ads.)

"/webdev/" means that the document that we are looking at is housed in a folder called "webdev". You will see that, in this way, URL's are similar to DOS path names. Notice that, with web documents, the forward slash (/) is used. DOS paths use the backward slash (\).

"part2.htm" is the actual file name of the web page.

Even the images that you see on a web page have their own URL's. Because of this, they can be accessed separately from the pages they are part of. (For example, the picture of Monty below is located at https://harryknight.tripod.com/images/monty.gif)

The Full Monty

"http" stands for "Hypertext Transfer Protocol." This defines the "mode" that the browser should assume for the next network transfer. Other transfer protocols that many modern browsers are capable of handling include ftp (File Transfer Protocol) and smtp (Send Mail Transfer Protocol.)

PART 1 PART 3

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