Uniform Resource Locators
by John Woody
Alamo PC Organization: HOME >
PC Alamode Magazine >
Columns >
Comm Corner
Uniform Resource Locators (URL) are the universal scheme, or standard,
of providing access to information on the Intnernet. The protocol or standard
provides two parts to the address. One protocol describes how to address
the resource, and the other protocol describes the specific information
to be addressed. The first protocol describes the application to be used:
protocol://
Gopher gopher://
Hypertext Transfer http://
Telnet telnet://
file file;//
File Transfer Protocol ftp://
The second protocol describes specific information and is usually in two
parts. The first part identifies the server and the second part describes
the path to the specific file. The server portion can specify the port
to be addressed. The default is :80. A typical server protocol might be:
http://the.server:8080/. This portion of the protocol can also incoude
the user ID and passoword, as: http://userid:passowrd@the.server/.
The second protocol or path and file name extension details exactly
wher on the server the file is located: as in:ftp://ds.internic.net/rfc/rec1738.txt.
Ref: Cobb Group, Volume 2, Number 4, April 1995.