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Interpret the Address:
Have you ever been entering the
address for a Web-site and wondered what all that gibberish really meant? Well wonder no
more! Actually, understanding what it means will also increase your ability to better surf
the Web. So sharpen your pencils students and let's figure these things out!
To URL or not to URL:
A Web address is called a URL
(Uniform Resource Locator), which exists for the sole purpose of helping your computer
locate information stored on another computer connected to the Web. Let us briefly analyze
a URL. We'll use the URL for this page as our example:
http://www.ocoeenet.net/guides/address.asp
Okay, let's try now to break this URL
down:
http: - HyperText Transfer Protocol:
This tells your browser that the
document contains text, links and graphics. You may also come across ftp (file
transfer protocol) as a prefix instead. This alerts your browser to identify the site as
an ftp site that allows you to access and download files from an ftp server. Downloading
has now become easier and ftp sites are becoming less common.
Another prefix you may encounter is gopher,
developed at the University of Minnesota (The Gopher is the school's mascot). Gopher uses
a menu-based system to tunnel through the Internet. The World Wide Web has made Gopher
virtually obsolete, but there are times where you will run into a Gopher. A Gopher URL
would look like this: gopher://gopher.micro.umn.edu,
and usually will lead to a text-only site.
// - Directories:
Folder and file names, just like as in
Windows or DOS.
ocoeenet.net - The Domain's name:
This is the name chosen by or allocated
to the person or company that owns the site.
/guides/ - The sub-directory or
folder:
This is the name of the folder or
sub-directory where the page is located in on the server.
address - The Name:
Here we have the actual name of the
page.
.html or .asp - Hyper Text Mark-up
Language:
Finally we have the suffix html
which tells the browser the type of coding the site is written in. You may also come
across .htm here too.
If you just want reach the "source" of the document, in this case our home page,
you can remove the syntax beyond the .net. So all you'll end up with is what is
shown here http://www.ocoeenet.net.
As browser technology advances we'll eventually find ourselves never bothering with this
sometimes awkward syntax. Even now, Netscape allows you to just type in "sesamestreet"
for example and you're magically whisked away to http://www.sesamestreet.com.
Unfortunately this only works with Web-sites with the ".com" extension.
Microsoft explorer uses the http and .html or .htm as standard
default settings permitting you to omit them when entering a URL.
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