Module 5: Understanding Web Addresses

 

You may have heard of these addresses referred to as URLs, which stands for Universal Resource Locator. As you can see by the examples below, URLs can range from being very simple to being very complex;

http://www.google.com

/library/admin/hours.htm

http://images.google.com/imgres?imgurl=www.nal.usda.gov/foodborne/fseducation/book.gif&imgre furl=http://www.nal.usda.gov/foodborne/fseducation/fsestoriesdb.html&h=187&w=236&prev=/images %3 Fq%3Dbook%26svnum%3D10%26hl%3Den%26lr%3D%26ie%3DUTF-8%26oe%3DUTF-8

Now, take a look at the parts of the simpler URLs. All three of these start with "http://" This stands for Hyper Text Transfer Protocol. When you are typing a URL into the address bar of your browser, you don't really need to include this part, in most cases, the browser will add it for you.

Many URLs will have the "www" in the address as well. This is the abbreviation for World Wide Web. Though it isn't always clear from the way the two words are used interchangeably, there is a difference between the Internet and the WWW. Included here is a great explanation;

"The Internet, of course, is the maze of phone and cable lines, satellites, and network cables that interconnect computers around the world. The Web is the name given to anything on the Internet that can be accessed using a [Universal] Resource Locator, or URL. This addressing system ... brought the Internet to the mainstream in the 1990s, eliminating the complicated commands and prompts that users previously had to type to access information. The vast majority of the content you access with a URL are files written in a code called Hypertext Markup Language, or HTML. We know HTML files as Web pages.

There are plenty of situations in which you use the Internet but not the Web—like when you send e-mail, obtain an MP3 using a peer-to-peer program..., or send an instant message with a program like ICQ. And some Web addresses don't start with "www." "     ----Sillery, Bob ed. "What is the difference between the Internet and the World Wide Web", Popular Science.2003.

Following the "www." is the name of the site. For example, in "http://www.google.com", google is the site name.

After the site name is the domain name. The "com" in "http://www.google.com". These domain names have different meanings. "Com" stands for commercial. Commonly used domain names are as follows;       

Zone Used for Zone Used for
com commercial sites gov government sites
edu educational sites net networking organizations
mil military sites org non-profit organizations

Sometimes at the end of a URL there will be another two letters present, and these represent the country of the web site. For example, "de" stands for Germany, "it" stands for Italy, and "ru" stands for Russia. A full example of a URL with a country code is ; "http://www.yahoo.co.jp/"

Module 6: Using e-mail

Web Tutorial Home