glossary

URL 


URL -

Meaning of URL – “Uniform Resource Locator”, is a string of characters used to represent and identify a page of information on the World Wide Web that is used by an web browser such as Netscape or Internet Explorer to find HTTP, FTP, telnet, gopher and other resources on the Internet.

The first part of the address lets you know what protocol to use. If you were told to visit the URL "ftp://ftp.download.com/readme.txt", you would be using the File Transfer Protocol (FTP) to download the file "readme.txt" from a remote computer. If the URL was "http://10.0.0.1/faq.html", you would be using Hypertext Transfer Protocol to read the document "faq.html" on the Web.

The second part of the address specifies the domain name or the IP address or the where the resource is located. In the above example, FTP was used to retrieve a document called "readme.txt" from a computer or server that has the domain name "download.com". Sometimes a domain name is not registered for an IP Address. In that case you would need to memorize a computer's IP address. In the second example, HTTP was used to locate a document called "faq.html" from a computer whose Internet Protocol address is 10.0.0.1. It is much easier to remember a domain name rather than an IP address when typing out URLs.

The concept of a URL was introduced in late 1990. At that time, it was called a hypertext name or document name.

 

Technical Terms