Creating Research-Based Web Sites with Netscape Composer

URL's

URLs (Uniform Resource Locators) are quite simply the equivalent of a street address for a web page.  Each web page that is created has a unique URL.  On occasion, you may also see URLs referred to by the name URIs (Uniform Resource Identifiers).  URLs and URIs are the same thing.

Let’s break down the information contained in a typical URL – for example we will look at a page from the UMW web site::

http://www.umw.edu/students

• http:// - this part of the URL defines the protocol being used to communicate with the web server.  Typically, web page addresses begin with HTTP (HyperText Transfer Protocol).  Some other protocols that you might notice in addresses are HTTPS (a version of HTTP with additional security features), FTP (File Transfer Protocol) which is used to upload or download files, or MAILTO: with indicates an email address.
  
• www.umw.edu – this is the name of the host (web server) for the University of Mary Washington.  The browser searches the internet for this host computer.
  
• /students – this is the Path, it serves as directions to the location of the requested file on the web server.

In summary, a URL tells the computers on the internet how it wants to communicate (the protocol), what server it wants to communicate with (the host name), and the location of the file on that server (the path).

Additional Resources about URLs:

• The Wikipedia has some good information about URLs:  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Url