Safari Books Online is a digital library providing on-demand subscription access to thousands of learning resources.
You’ve probably heard the familiar “h” “t” “t” “p” “colon” “slash” “slash” a zillion times, but what does it mean? First, of all, the Web addresses you type into the browser are called URLs or Uniform Resource Locators.
If it were up to us we would have called them “Web addresses,” but no one asked, so we’re stuck with Uniform Resource Locators. Here’s how to decipher a URL:
A Uniform Resource Locator (URL) is a global address that can be used to locate anything on the Web, including HTML pages, audio, video, and many other forms of Web content.
In addition to specifying the location of the resource, a URL also names the protocol that you can use to retrieve that resource.
To locate anything on the Web, as long as you know the server that hosts it, and an absolute path to the resource, you can create a URL and most likely get a Web browser to retrieve it for you using some protocol – usually HTTP.