Anatomy of a URL What is a URL anyway?

URL stands for Uniform Resource Locator That’s just another way to say it’s an address pointing to an Internet resource.

Think of it like you think of your address. The post office can’t deliver a letter unless there is a unique address to deliver it. You need the number of the house, the name of the street, the city or town and the correct zip code.

Every site on the Internet has its own unique URL. You can learn a lot about the site just by understanding its URL.

Example http://www.google.com/ http www google.com Stands for hyper text transfer protocol That indicates the means by which the data is sent over the Internet. (Some other protocols are ftp and mailto, but http is most common.) www Stands for world wide web google.com Is the domain name. The first part (google) must be registered officially to insure that there are not two identical domain names. The second part (.com) gives clues to the type of site it is.

Some Common Suffixes for Domain Names Type of Page Domain Suffix Example Advocacy or Organization Webpage .org http://www.ncte.org Business/Commercial Webpage .com http://crayola.com .biz http://www.billboard.biz/bbbiz/ Government Information Webpage .gov http://www.nysed.gov Educational Webpage .edu http://www.mvcc.edu Personal Webpage Tilde after the suffix (~) http://www.unm.edu/~lhendr Military Webpage .mil http://www.navy.mil Network Organization Webpage .net http://www.whois.net Informational Webpage .info http://mta.info Webpages with Video .tv http://www.tnt.tv Country Codes (examples; there are too many to list) .ca, .uk http://toronto.ca, http://www.bbc.co.uk/

What the Suffixes Mean Domain Suffix Example .org Advocate a particular point of view or deal with a specific subject or topic; nonprofit .com For profit; may be trying to sell you something .biz .gov Government website; generally up-to-date, accurate, unbiased .edu Educational institution; generally up-to-date, accurate, unbiased tilde after the suffix (~) Personal site; could be biased or unbiased; could be trying to sell you something; could be accurate or inaccurate. .mil From the military; perhaps biased, accurate, generally up-to-date .net This URL was designed for organizations involved in networking technologies, but restrictions were not enforced and it is now a general purpose name space. .info Created in 2000 for informative web sites .tv Contains video; could be personal, business, or professional site. .ca, .uk, etc. From specific countries; could be commercial; a site originating in a specific country

Information that comes AFTER the suffix: The letters/words that follow the domain take you to specific webpages or to directories (folders) For example: http://www.nytimes.com/pages/world/index.html takes you to the main page of the world news page on the NYTimes website The last characters of a URL indicate the type of file: htm or html are webpages jpg or gif or png are images doc are word documents pdf are pdf files aspx are dynamic webpages There are others as well; too many to mention