What Is a URL?

URL is the acronym for something called a Uniform Resource Locator. It is known as an address that is used on the Internet. Every time you want to view or get a file on the World Wide Web, you need to access the file via its URL.

A URL is like your complete mailing address: it specifies all the information necessary for someone to address an envelope to you. However, they are much more than that, since URLs can refer to a variety of very different types of resources. A more fitting analogy would be a system for specifying your mailing address, your phone number, or the location of the book you just read from the public library, all in the same format.

In short, a URL is a very convenient and succinct way to direct people and applications to a file or other electronic resources. Learning how to interpret, use, and construct URLs will greatly assist your exploration of the Internet.

The idea behind URLs is actually a good one -- create a universal system for accessing information on the Internet, no matter if is a single document (HTML page) on a server, a file on an anonymous FTP site, a query from a database, an entire gopher server, or even a Web images. In other words ... “it it’s out there, you can point to it!”

Unfortunately, that means that to access files in the World Wide Web, you have to get use to seeing, and typing, things like:

             http://www.eff.org/pub/Publications/EFF_Net_Guide/netguide.eff

This is the actual Web address for a great paper, electronic book, named the “Everybody’s Guide to the Internet”.

Where do you use URLs

Whenever you work with your browser, you will use URLs. When you want to go to a specific resource of the Internet, you would type in the name of the URL. For instance, while using Netscape, you may want to go to Yahoo, a search engine on the Internet. To do this, you would type in the name of the URL in the Location field of Netscape (below the menu and main program buttons. It would look something like this:

Most browsers have a similar location for typing in the name of a URL you want to go to. Once you type in the name of the URL and press enter, the browser will connect to the Internet and attempt to locate that URL. If it can find it, it will go to it and display the URL or offer to download it, if the browser does not recognize the format.

Comparing URLs to file names

The URL above is the address (location and filename) for a specific document. When the URL concept was introduced, users of the Internet agreed that a single methodology needed to be created that would allow anyone on the Web to find and access anything on the Internet.

To understand what a URL is and how you use them, let us compare a URL to a filename on a computer.

For instance, you may want to copy a text file named myFile.txt that is on your D: hard drive to a floppy disk. You know that the file is sitting on drive D: in a sub-directory named D:\DOCUMENT\WINWORD6\TEXTFILE\. To copy this file you can move to the drive using the change drive command (D:) and then move to the directory using the change directory (CHDIR or CD) command and finally use the copy command to copy the file to drive A:. This would take a minimum of three commands:

            D:
            cd \document\winword6\textfile
            copy myFile.txt a:\myFile.txt

An alternative is to copy the file using one command that references the drive, directory and filename:

           copy d:\document\winword6\textfile\myFile.txt a:\myFile.txt

Although the second method is longer, it is prone to the same level of error as the first method. Specifically, typos.

In this case, the file was sitting on your own computer. If the file was on a network that you were a part of, you could have just as easily copied the file from the network. To copy the file from the network, you replace the local drive and directory name with the network drive and directory name where the file actually resides.

Prev Next

Working on the Internet || Send E-Mail