Felitaur Enterprises, URL Explanation Page

URL Explanation Page URLs, or Uniform Resource Locaters, are vital to your time on the internet. They tell your software what type of resource, and exactly where that resource is in the vast world of the internet. They are very picky in how you type them. No spaces can be added, no commas instead of periods. The slashes must go this way / and NOT this way \. And they are case senstive, meaning "A" does not equal "a".

A full URL can include several parts. It MUST include a protocol. If you don't type one in, web browsers will assume it is "http://" the web page protocol. There are several others, some are starting to fade from the internet. NOTE: An Email address will be of the form username@someplace.com . If you have a protocol, such as http:// , or / or other odd chars, it's not a proper email.

Depending on the system, you may have several words seperated by "." and these may refer to a particular machine name or an alias for a web server directory, but there will always be two final words separated by a period. The first will be a Primary Domain, which you can purchase. These names are owned by a single person/company. I purchased the primary domain "felitaur". Then you have the top level domains (TLD), which are limited. They divide the internet up into large chunks.

So, the full domain name gets you to the right computer, then, often, you have sub directories after that. They are always separated by "/" . Finally, you have the file name and extension. The extension tells you what type of file it is, and the most common is .html or .htm, which is a web page. Often no filename.extension is used, so the web server looks for the default homepage name which on most systems, mine included, is index.html.

Entering an URL (web address)
1. http://mcmuse.mc.maricopa.edu/interent/content.html
2. Protocols
  1. http:// (World Wide Web)
  2. ftp:// (file transfer protocol)
  3. gopher://
  4. telnet://
  5. news:
  6. mailto: (for web page use only, news: and mailto: have no //)
  7. username@somewhere.com (standard email address form, usually NOT for web use)
3. Machine name, subnet name etc
4. Primary Domain
5. Top Level Domains
  1. .edu (educational)
  2. .mil
  3. .gov
  4. .org
  5. .net
  6. .com
  7. .ca, .fr, .au etc
6. Pathname and directories (note ~username indicates a users home directory)
7. filename
  1. default filnames (often index.html)
  2. filename extensions
    1. .htm or .html
    2. .shtml (server side includes)
    3. .asp (Active Server Pages)
    4. .php (Hypertext Pre Processor, or personal home page)
    5. .jsp (java servlet pages)
    6. .swf (flash animations)
    7. .txt
    8. .jpg or .jpeg
    9. .gif
    10. .exe
    11. .mid
    12. .pdf
    13. .wav
    14. .zip
    15. .gz
    16. .tar or .tgz
    17. .ram
    18. .ps