WEB ADDRESSES/URL'S DEFINED
Issue 8, March 2000
By Marie Gallagher
Graphic Design & Support

Every page has a web address or URL. URL stands for Uniform Resource Locator. Just like we have mailing addresses for our homes and businesses. Each element of the address tells you a little more about how to find it.

123 Sesame Street Street Address New York, NY City, State

A URL works in much the same way:

http://www.arq.net/about

http://www.
Stands for Hypertext Transfer Protocol, meaning this is a Web Page on the World Wide Web.

Arq.net
This is the domain name, who own's the site and where the web page file is kept at. This one is kept at an ARQ server.

/about
After the domain name, the rest of the address just tells you where in that directory to find the page. On our ARQ server, there is a folder called "about".

Domain name extensions

.com - commercial organizations
.net - network organizations
.org - non-profit organizations
.edu - educational organizations
.gov - government organizations
.mil - military organizations

There are also country codes you might see in the domain name.

Jp Japan
Ca Canada
De Germany
Ru Russia
Us United States
Au Australia
Fr France
Mx Mexico
Ch Switzerland
Uk United Kingdom ·

The period . is pronounced dot. ·

The slash / is always a forward slash, the one with the ? key on the keyboard. ·

The tilde ~ (pronounced till duh) is on the top left key before the 1 key. ·

The URL's are case-sensitive. ·

There are no spaces in URL's.