Uniform Resource Locator

From Saferpedia

URL - Uniform Resource Locator represents the Internet address of a site or a file without containing any special characters or spaces. For identifying different directories inside the address there are used two lines "//" before the directory. The first part of the address identify the used protocol and the second part specify the IP address of the domain where source is located.

Relationship between URL and URN (Uniform Resource Name) for URI

In day by day use and in many technical documents and talks URL is incorrectly used as synonymous of URI - Uniform Resource Identifier. The most known example of a URL is the address of a web page from World Wide Web, for example [www.saferpedia.eu].

History

URL was created in 1994 by Tim Berners-Lee, Marc Andreessen, Mark P. McCahill, Alan Emtage, Peter J. Deutsch and Jon Postel as part of URI. Berners Lee regrets using the colon sign to separate the path to server in URI and wants to use the slash character "/". Also Berners recognized that the use of the two slashes after "http:" were unnecessary.

Syntax

Each URL is formed from the following: scheme name (usually called protocol), followed by a colon sign, then according to the scheme a host name (or IP address), a port number, the path of the resource for download or the software to be run, then programs like CGI (Common Gateway Interface), an arrow of queries and HTML documents, an anchor (optional) for the web page.

The combined syntax is: Scheme:// username:password@domain:port/path?query_string#anchor.

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