What is a URL

What is A URL, How Does It Work?

We humans are good for one thing--being organised to make our life much simpler. Even though the world of computers is made up of 0s and 1s, programs and algorithms and all the gibberish the common man just cannot understand, almost everyone can and is using a computer. So how is it done? What’s the mechanism behind it all?

Everyone knows the internet--one of man’s greatest creations. It is a huge network of information. It’s like a massive spider web, where information can be represented as tiny little spiders moving through all parts of the web. Each specific point in the web has an address. We can send and receive information by accessing each address on the web. The official name of a web address is called the URL or Universal Resource Locator. It is the long space on the top of your web browsers like Internet Explorer, Google Chrome and Mozilla Firefox. Simply put in the whole address on the long space and you are directed to the webpage. Putting in that address is like going to a specific location on the spider web where information about that web page is stored.

Next stop is the structure of the URL. The first thing you see is http. This stands for Hyper Text Transfer Protocol. It is the protocol identifier. In other words, it’s like a set of rules for transferring text from one computer to another. You don’t really have to type this in every time you want to surf the net as the computer automatically does this for you. Following that is WWW or the World Wide Web. This is the actual web while http is just the method of going to different parts of the web. Next comes the most important part of the whole address, which is the second level domain name, or as all of us know it simply as, the web page. Google and Yahoo are some of the most famous web pages. Then comes the top level domain name. The .com is the most famous and most widely used domain. It is used by over half the websites on the Internet. The .com has a few siblings, little brothers or sisters as you could call it. A few examples would include .org which is for non-profit organizations or organizations that just don’t want to use the all too common .com. Others would include .edu which is used by schools, universities and other teaching institutes, and .gov which is used mainly by governments or governmental agencies or branches.

In short, if you want to go to Yahoo, simply type in www.yahoo.com, and the computer will take you there. Anything that goes after this address are extensions and takes you further into Yahoo, just like going into the different apartments in a 20-floor building; but don’t worry about that as the computer does it for you. All anyone really needs to know are the basics of what a webpage (or URL) or link is, and the full address of the web page to go to it.

A Computer Guy

What is A URL, How Does It Work?