URL And The Parts Of A URLComputer

What is a URL?

It is known in computer science as  URL  (abbreviations of the English: Uniform Resource Locator, that is to say, Uniform Locator of Resources) to the standard sequence of characters that identifies and allows to locate and to recover a determined information in the Internet . What we write in the browser or browser box to visit a certain web page, commonly referred to as “address”, is just its  URL .

Just as in real life each house or business has a postal address necessary to send something by mail, on the Internet each resource (image, video, text, audio or web page ) has an associated address, which is necessary to have access to information.

Therefore, when we visit a web page, we enter your address and receive it in the browser. But inside it, every photograph, text or resource of some kind also has an   associated URL , with which it can be recovered to carry out the “assembly” of the web page as a whole.

Also, when you click on a certain hyperlink , it will take you to another  URL , either from a new web page or simply to see any of the resources of the previous one.

For example, the most popular search engine on the web, “Google”, responds to the URL  http://www.google.com  in general, but its personalized national versions have slightly different addresses:  http://www.google.com .ar  (Argentina), 
http://www.google.com.ve  (Venezuela),  http://www.google.com.br  (Brazil).

1. What is a URL for?

As has been said, a URL is a specific address within the ocean of information on the Internet. It serves to locate different data and information that are necessary for the on-line browsing experience, that is, to build the Web pages and to provide timely access to the user to everything they want to visit within the network .

Thus, entering the URL of an image will take us to it; the one of a specific file will take us to download it, and the one of an on-line program to execute it, all within the capacities and specifications of the web browser that we are using for it.

2. features

URLs have the following characteristics:

• Accuracy . URLs must be written accurately so that they show the expected result. Any error in the chain will prevent recovering the desired information.
• Sequence . URLs are a sequence of ordered details, which must be entered in precise sequence, such as a postal address.
• U nic ity . Each URL is unique to a resource or page of the Network, there are not two identical or two different that lead to the same exact element (although there may be many versions of the same element, say, a photograph, or there may be many pages using the same one URL to retrieve it).

3. Parts of a URL

Each URL is composed of a sequence of parts, which allude to specific information about the location of the resource, and which can be viewed separately:

•  Network protocol . Http , Https, mailto and ftp are the main web protocols that head a URL, indicating to the machine what type of connection should be made and what is the specific language that will be spoken with the computer or the computer network that will provide the information to the user .
• Service . Www, www2, etc., is about possible online information support services, of which the  World Wide Web is the most popular.
• Domain, type of domain and country . It is the “name” of the company that provides the information, or the project or network or the computer where they are located, that is, the specific name of who has what we are looking for; In addition, the type of service provided: commercial (.com), educational (.edu), etc., and the country to which it belongs: Argentina (.ar), Brazil (.br), Italy (.it), etc.
• Path and file name . The folders and directories in which the specific resource is located within the server computer (which provides the information).

4. Timeline URL – website

Most browsers keep a chronology or history of URLs visited, such as a record of the addresses that were used to request information. These data are usually sensitive and protected by security mechanisms, since unscrupulous interests in the network could access them and collect personal information about the user’s browsing habits, thus violating their privacy.