Web Addresses

Generally, we can think about “finding” a web location in one of two ways: via its relative or absolute address (or URL). Let’s create a scenario to start.

Consider the file “profile.png,” found on your website:

We need to decide where to place this image in our directory, and how the site should locate it.

What U. R. L(ooking for):

You invite an old friend to come visit you, but they don’t know where you currently live. When they ask for your address, you give them your country, state, city, street, and house number.

We find sites and files 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 address” or uniform resource 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.

Continue to the next page to find out how this is done for the web.