What U. R. L(ooking for):

You want to mail a package to an old friend, but you don’t know where to send it. When you ask for their address, you get a country, state, city, steet, and house number.

We find sites on the web in pretty much the same way, but instead of looking for houses, we’re looking for other computers, servers, files, or even queries on a network. A “web addresses” or uniform resouce locator (URL) is assigned to every website so that users and servers can find that site quickly and easily.

Directions for a site can be broken down similarly (in the most basic sense) to directions to a house, but more applicably into protocol, domain, path and file.

Relative and Absolute

Consider the file “profile.jpg” and its URL: https://www.example.com/about/images/profile.jpg

An aboslute URL contains all of the protocols and information for the file’s location. If I am the owner of www.another-example.com and I want to link to “profile.jpg” I will need it’s absolute URL (https://www.example.com/about/images/profile.jpg) as it lives on a separate site than mine.

Relative URLs contain no protocols or domain information. This is convenient because they are shorter, but can only reference files in the same path. If I am the owner of www.example.com and am embedding “profile.jpg” on my About page, I can do so relatively with “./images/profile.jpg” as long as the images folder is in the same path as my page. I do not need an abosolute URL.

The “.” is a path component stating that we need to remain in the current level of our directory heirarchy. Effecively, it says “to find this file, begin here and then head down inside the images folder, where you’ll see profile.jpg.”

This will be handy for you as you start to link to your own images within your repo.

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Please read this quick breakdown on the parts an pieces that make up a URL before moving onto “File Management:”

doepud.co.uk - “Anatomy of a URL”

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