How do you address a message so that it reaches the appropriate destination? Traffic on the Internet reaches the correct destination through the use of name and address conventions. The "address" of a Web resource consists of the domain (for example, yahoo.com) plus additional information regarding the resource on the Web server (for example, yahoo.com/news/). The full "address" is called a Uniform Resource Locator, or "URL."
For example,
- www.amazon.com is a URL, while
- Amazon.com is a domain name.
Digital Transformation
A URL specifies a unique address to a resource on the Internet.
A resource can be a specific
- web page,
- a document, or
- an image.
URLs are sometimes called URIs, or Uniform Resource Identifiers, but URL is the more common term.
Delimiters, or marks, separate the parts of a URL address. In general, the first part of a URL indicates which protocol to use;
the second part specifies where the resource is located. The following MouseOver identifies and defines each part of a URL:
In addition to specifying an address, URLs can make requests of host computers. For example, the URL,
https://digital.com/ecommerce-platforms/volusion/
is a request for the computer named www in the domain
https://digital.com/ecommerce-platforms/3dcart/
This type of URL was used for building interactive Web sites using CGI scripts and other programming techniques.
In the next lesson, the specifics of domain names will be discussed.