by iakul

Created on: August 04, 2008

First, an explanation of what an Internet URL is. Think of a URL,which stands for Uniform Resource Locator, as the address of a file you have given your computer to find. And just like an address in the physical world has different parts that denote country, city, street and so on, each part of an URL denotes the same counterpart for your computer. No two webpages share the same URL.

Now let's take a URL as an example take a look at the the different parts of it

http://www.helium.com/items/1132502-are-people-inh erently-good

The "HTTP" part, which stands for Hypertext Transfer Protocol, is what is know as the protocol identifier. Think of this as telling your computer what methods to use when finding a file. In the physical world that would be equivalent to saying whether you want to use express mail or ordinary mail. Besides HTTP, other protocols include HTTPS (for secure web pages, with the "s" standing for secure), File Transfer Protocol (FTP), File, Gopher, and News.

Just like in the physical world, where saying whether you want express mail is not exactly part of the address proper, so we now have a "//", to separate the protocol identifier from the rest of the URL or the "real" address. The rest of the URL are collectively known as the resource name.

Now we move on to "www.helium.com". This part denotes the name of the computer where the file is hosted. It's physical world equivalent would be the "country and street" part of the address.

And now the last part of the URL, "items/1132502-are-people-inherently-good". This part is where you denote the directory structure and filename. The physical equivalent for it would be the apartment number or (office) department. A URL may have any number of directories in it, just like when sending a letter to a large company you might have to include the department, branch of the department, branch of the branch of the department... Or the URL may not have a single directory in it at all e.g. "http://www,helium.com" Think of this as going to the company itself instead of one of it's department or branches.

We have now covered all the different parts of an URL. Put together, they tell your computer the exact address of the file to look for.

Every now and then something like this occurs. You type in the URL, you wait, and after a while you find that you get a page error message. What has happened? Your computer is telling you that it can't find anything at the address you gave. Like physical world addresses, where there is a world of difference between posting to "avenue 5" and "avenue 6" you might have gotten a part of the URL wrong. Or like physical world occupants, the file might have been moved. Either temporarily offline, or more permanently to another URL. If it's temporary, you'll just have to wait. If it's to another URL, you'll have to get that new URL.

Now you might also have come across redirection sites like TinyURL where entering in a different URL will take you to another site. This might seem to violate the rule of " no two webpages sharing the same URL" so I'll explain it. The URL a site like TinyURL provides acts just like a forwarding address in the physical world. And just like a forwarding address doesn't really exists at the address it forwards to, redirection sites don't actually share the URL" but just "forwards" to it. When you go to the URL of the redirection site, it runs a short code that redirects you to the site you are looking for.

So now we have it. You now know the way an Internet URL works.

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