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How
web addresses work
When you type a web address (often
called a "URL" - Universal Resource Locator, if you're
interested) into your browser, it doesn't care whether the site is in Australia or the house next door. Sometimes it's nice to
know, though. You can't always tell where a site is by examining the
address, but you can often tell quite a lot.We can take this address apart
and learn things from it. The first part, http:// is called the scheme and
is the same in nearly all web addresses. It doesn't tell us anything much
(it says "this is a web page" - but we knew that), so we can
strip that out and forget about it,We can also strip out the last part,
"index.htm", which is the name of the HTML document we are
looking at. You don't normally bother to type that part in anyway for an
index page, because if you don't specify a document, your browser
automatically looks for a document called "index.htm" or similar
at the location specified. The remainder, www.jonstorm.com is the important
part, and you often see web addresses written like this because they are
easier to remember. The "dots" (full stops/periods) separate the
address into domains. You start reading from right to left, and the last
part, which is called the "top level domain", tells you (at least
in theory) that the owner is a company. It doesn't tell you where though.
Originally .com (pronounced "dot com"), meant a US company, but nowadays it could be anyone who is
or wants to appear international. The internet was mostly created in the
US, and the designers first set up domains for commercial organisations
(.com), educational establishments (.edu), the US government (.gov), non-profit
organisations (.org) and a few others. It didn't occur to anyone that other
countries would be on the net too. When companies from other countries
started appearing on the net, they were mostly quite happy to be .com and
so indistinguishable from a US company. Not so good for governments though, who
certainly didn't want to be indistinguishable from the US government! And not ideal for people offering a
service only applicable to a particular geographic area, like a restaurant
or a theatre, or whose website is in a language other than English. So a
new set of domains was created, one for each country :
.fr for France, .uk for the United Kingdom, .us for the United States, and so on. Rather than replacing the original
domains, which would have meant everyone who had an address in one of the
original domains would have had to change it, the new domains were created
alongside them. The US pretty much ignored the new .us domain and
carried on using the old ones. But the other countries quickly started using
their national domains. Some countries, like the UK and Australia, subdivided their national domains into similar
categories to the original ones, so a UK government website will end in .gov.uk, and an
Australian corporate website will be .com.au. Instead of using .com.uk, the
UK decided to shorten it, just to be different, so UK corporates are .co.uk, which is very popular
with UK companies, because it's a lot safer buying
things over the web if the company you are buying from is in your own
country - makes it much easier to resolve any disputes. Other countries,
like France (.fr) and Germany (.de) decided not to subdivide their domain into
categories, so the French ISP Freesurf simply have the address freesurf.fr.
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