HTML and CSS

3. URL

It is an abbreviation of the term Uniform Resource Locator.

The word 'resource' in this case is referring to any object that can be accessed over a network, whether that network is local, wide or the Internet itself. A resource can be a specific web page, a file of some kind for example a file containing html, css, javascript, video, sound and so on. It could also be the location of a streaming resource such as a video streaming service.

An URL has a standard (Uniform) format made up of different parts.

For example this is an URL

https://teach-ict.com/glossary/U/url.htm

https - this part identifies the protocol needed to access the resource. In this case the browser needs to use the https protocol. Another common one is http. Not every resource needs to accessed from a browser, for example to download and upload files to a server, a common protocol is FTP or file transfer protocol.

teach-ict.com - this part is the domain of the resources i.e. the web site address

/glossary/U/ - this part is the folder path to locate the exact folder where the resource is stored

url.htm - this is the file name of the resource, in this case it is a htm web page. Note that the htm page itself will also contain URL addresses that needs to be accessed in order to render the web page itself. The browser handles all this extra detail in the background.

If you type or copy that URL into your current browser, then you will see the page we have created to describe an URL in our glossary section

There are other parts to an URL such as a port address and parameters, but the URL example covers the most common parts.