What is a url in computer terms?

Question

What is a url in computer terms?

Answer 1

Anything you see on the web is basically a page of HTML text similar to other documents on your home PC. Like any document on your home PC it has a name and a location somewhere on a hard disk.

A webpage location consists of a web server somewhere on the web and a location somewhere on that servers hard disk.

URL stands for Universal Resource Locator. “Universal” is meant to convey “anywhere/any computer  on the Web” and “resource” means any website,  webpage, web image and anything else you can access from it  Like a lot of things in computing the detailed plumbing of how it all works can be mind numbingly detailed. In brief for the Web to work you need a way of (1) contacting other computers on the web (2) getting access to stuff that is on those computers.These objectives are achieved by a set of linked communication ‘protocols’ or processes running on your PC. For more info research TCP/IP and HTTP

A URL is simply an address for a website or page,  image or other ‘resource” on a website which these protocols can recognise interpret and use to navigate you to the place you want to be.

Answer 2

Uniform Resource Locator

It locates the destination of a file/website.

Hope this helps.

Dan

Answer 3

It is a Uniform Resource Locator, in other words the location of a resource on the internet.

For example, http://www.aoqua.com/mystuff/mypage.html is a url. It tells the browser that the file mypage.html can be accessed by using the http protocol from the www.aoqua.com server(s) under the mystuff context.

The browser will use DNS to translate "www.aoqua.com" into an IP address, such as 123.456.789.10 and, since it's going to use http to GET the file it will use port 80 (which is the default port for http requests).

Basically the browser sends the request GET /mystuff/mypage.html to the server machine at 123.456.789.10 on port 80.

SO you see that the URL specifies the exact location and retrieval method of the desired resource on the internet.

Answer 4

In computer terms a URL is an address.

Answer 5

Web sites are found by their addresses. Each web site has a URL, or Uniform Resource Locator, assigned to it. This is how a URL is broken down:

http://websearch.about.com/od/dailywebse... is our example.

http://: type of file

domain name: location of the file's web server is at websearch.about.com.

backslash,then file name: path or directory on the computer to this file; which in our case is "od/dailywebsearchtips/qt". You're just basically moving from sub-directory to sub-directory here.

name of file: name of file, usually ending in .html or .htm. My file name is "dnt0526".  

Answer 6

Uniform Resource Locator http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/URL

Answer 7

It stands for 'Uniform Resource Locator'

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/URL