Web Addresses Explained
"Hardware: the parts of a computer that can be kicked" (Jeff Pesis)
A web address is sometimes called a URI. A precise definition of URI can be found in the Glossary but you certainly don't need to know it in order to use one!
What you do need to know is that a URI can be a Web page's address on the Internet - just like an address in the physical world identifies where someone lives.
To get a letter to someone, we must be sure to include their house number, street address, city, and zip/post code.
The URI below also has individual parts which are necessary to distinguish it from all other pages on the Web.
http://www.microsoft.com/ms.htm
This is the URI for the front page of Microsoft's web site. It looks ridiculously complicated, but we'll make some sense of it. First of all, a period is always called a dot. You really give yourself away as a newbie if you say "period" or "point" when quoting a web address. A dot separates the major parts of the address whilst a slash ( / ) separates subdivisions within the main parts. A dash ( - ) is used to connect words as spaces are not allowed in a URI.
Now let's looks at each part of this URI:
- http:
- This refers to the protocol (or method) that your browser is using to communicate with the server on which this site is kept. In this case, you're using Hypertext - as you will with all web sites.
- www
- Pretty obvious - World Wide Web. It's there to distinguish this address from one which might refer to a local, non-Internet, address. It's rather like the situation in a business where there is a local mail system (which uses an internal set of addresses) and also mail which is going outside the building via the normal postal service. You'd use a different form of address for each type, yes? Web addresses are no different.
- microsoft.com
- This refers to the domain name of this web site. Obviously the first part refers to Microsoft whilst the second part (.com) indicates that this is a commercial company. Every com, org or net etc has to be registered with a central agency. Information within this register can be used to pinpoint the geographical location and computer where each and every web site is stored. Your browser uses this information (which you could imagine as rather like a detailed street map) to find the web site you want.
- ms.htm
- The name of the actual document you will see in your browser.
So to extend our postal address analogy to almost breaking point:
- www = the city
- microsoft.com = the street name
- ms.htm = the house number.
Many web sites contain more than one section. You can think of these rather like floors in a building. You'll be able to recognise them by additional sections, separated by a "/" in the middle of an address. There are also some URIs that end in letters other than html or htm - such as cgi, php or asp. But don't worry about these technicalities. Our postal address analogy, whilst not being technically perfect, will be sufficient to give you a basic idea of what is going on.