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Lesson 3Internet addresses
ObjectiveIdentify Components and Function of URL

Identify Components and Function of URL

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,
  1. www.amazon.com is a URL, while
  2. Amazon.com is a domain name.

A URL specifies a unique address to a resource on the Internet. A resource can be a specific
  1. web page,
  2. a document, or
  3. an image.
URLs are sometimes called URIs, or Uniform Resource Identifiers, but URL is the more common term.

<2>Parts of a URL
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:

url-functional-components
Parts of a URL

Internet Addresses

Other Uses for URLs

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.