What is an URL?

URL - Uniform (or universal) Resource Locator. 



The Uniform Resource Locator (URL) is the web address of a World Wide Web page.It was developed by Tim Berners-Lee in 1994.It provides the address for locating the information on the Internet.Every web page will have unique URL.

A URL will always starts with a protocol prefix like "http://", ftp://, gopher://, telnet://, and irc:// etc.It uses forward slashes (/) and dots to separate its parts.A URL uses numbers and wont have spaces in between.

ex,

http://in.yahoo.com/.

The language used in URL is English.

For Example,

URL               : http://www.Yahoo.com

Domain name  : Yahoo.com

Domain : Yahoo

Subdomain     : www

Top level domain : com

The domain name is made up of the domain + top level domains(or domain suffix).

To know in detail about domain name and top level domains visit my previous post.

Here, http:// stands for HyperText Transfer Protocol.It enables the browser to know what protocol it is going to use to access the information specified in the domain.

 Uniform Resource Locator 

In other words,the domain name is the overall web site identifier and the URL is the locator for a particular resource on the Internet.

In short,The first part of the URL is called a protocol identifier and it indicates what protocol to use, and the second part is called a resource name and it specifies the IP address or the domain name where the resource is located. The protocol identifier and the resource name are separated by a colon and two forward slashes.